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DEFINITIONS 



ESSAYS IN CONTEMPORARY CRITICISM 



BY 



HENRY SEIDEL CANBY, Ph.D. 

Editor of The Literary Re'vieiu of The Neiv York E<vening Postj 
and a member of the English Department of Yale University 




NEW YORK 

HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY 



.Ci> 



COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY 
HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, INC. 



PRINTED IN THE U. S. A. BY 

THE QUINN & BODEN COMPANY 

RAHWAY. N J 



AUG 19 1922 

.A677904 



ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 

The author wishes to acknowledge the courtesy of 
The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's Magazine, The Cen- 
tury Magazine, The Literary Review of The New 
York Evening Post, The Bookman, The Nation, and 
The North American Review for permission to reprint 
such of these essays as have appeared in their columns. 



PREFACE 

The unity of this book is to be sought in the point 
of view of the writer rather than in a sequence of 
chapters developing a single theme and arriving at 
categorical conclusions. Literature in a civilization 
like ours, which is trying to be both sophisticated and 
democratic at the same moment of time, has so many 
sources and so many manifestations, is so much in- 
volved with our social background, and is so much 
a question of life as well as of art, that many doors 
have to be opened before one begins to approach an 
understanding. The method of informal definition 
which I have followed in all these essays is an attempt 
to open doors through which both writer and reader 
may enter into a better comprehension of what novel- 
ists, poets, and critics have done or are trying to ac- 
complish. More than an entrance upon many a vexed 
controversy and hidden meaning I cannot expect to 
have achieved in this book; but where the door would 
not swing wide I have at least tried to put one foot 
in the crack. The sympathetic reader may find his 
own way further; or may be stirred by my endeavor 
to a deeper appreciation, interest, and insight. That 
is my hope. 

New York, April, 1922. 



CONTENTS 

PREFACE 
I. ON FICTION 



PAGE 



Sentimental America 3 

Free Fiction 19 

A Certain Condescension 1'oward Fiction . . 40 

The Essence of Popularity . . . . . 57 

II. ON THE AMERICAN TRADITION 

The American TRADITIO^f 77 

Back to Nature . . 92 

Thanks to the Artists 109 

To-day in American Literature: Addressed to 

the British .112 

Time's Mirror 128 

The Family Magazine 132 

III. THE NEW GENERATION 

The Young Romantics 149 

Puritans All 164 

The Older Generation 167 

A Literature of Protest 170 

Barbarians a la Mode .174 

ix 



Contents 
IV. THE REVIEWING OF BOOKS 



PAGE 



A Prospectus for Criticism 185 

The Race of Reviewers 195 

The Sins of Reviewing 203 

Mrs. Wharton's "The Age of Innocence" . .212 

Mr. Hergesheimer's ''Cytherea" 217 

V. PHILISTINES AND DILETTANTE 

Poetry for the Unpoetical . . . . .227 

Eye, Ear, and Mind 243 

Out with the Dilettante . . . . . 246 

Flat Prose 249 

VI. MEN AND THEIR BOOKS 

Conrad and Melville 257 

The Novelist of Pity 269 

Henry James 278 

The Satiric Rage of Butler 282 

CONCLUSION 

Defining the Indefinable 291 



I 

On Fiction 



Sentimental America 

The Oriental may be inscrutable, but he is no more 
puzzling than the average American. We admit that 
we are hard, keen, practical, — the adjectives that every 
casual European applies to us, — and yet any book- 
store window or railway ncws-stand will show that we 
prefer sentimental magazines and books. Why should 
a hard race — if we are hard — read soft books? 

By soft books, by sentimental books, I do not mean 
only the kind of literature best described by the word 
"squashy." I doubt whether we write or read more 
novels and short stories of the tear-dripped or hyper- 
emotional variety than other nations. Germany is — 
or was — full of such soft stuff. It is highly popular 
in France, although the excellent taste of French criti- 
cism keeps it in check. Italian popular literature ex- 
udes sentiment; and the sale of "squashy" fiction in 
England is said to be threatened only by an occasional 
importation of an American "best-seller." We have 
no bad eminence here. Sentimentalists with enlarged 
hearts are international in habitat, although, it must 
be admitted, especially popular in America. 

When a critic, after a course in American novels 
and magazines, declares that life, as it appears on 
the printed page here, is fundamentally sentimental- 
ized, he goes much deeper than "mushiness" with his 

3 



4 On Fiction 

charge. He means, I think, that there is an alarming 
tendency in American fiction to dodge the facts of 
life — or to pervert them. He means that in most pop- 
ular books only red-blooded, optimistic people are wel- 
come. He means that material success, physical sound- 
ness, and the gratification of the emotions have the 
right of way. He means that men and women (except 
the comic figures) shall be presented, not as they are, 
but as we should like to have them, according to a 
judgment tempered by nothing more searching than 
our experience with an unusually comfortable, safe, and 
prosperous mode of living. Every one succeeds in 
American plays and stories — ^if not by good thinking, 
why then by good looks or good luck. A curious society 
the research student of a later date might make of it — 
an upper world of the colorless successful, illustrated 
by chance-saved collar advertisements and magazine 
covers; an underworld of grotesque scamps, clowns, 
and h5^henates drawn from the comic supplement; and 
all — red-blooded hero and modern gargoyle alike — 
always in good humor. 

I am not touching in this picture merely to attack 
it. It has been abundantly attacked; what it needs 
is definition. For there is much in this bourgeois, 
good-humored American literature of ours which rings 
true, which is as honest an expression of our indi- 
viduality as was the more austere product of ante- 
bellum New England. If American sentimentality does 
invite criticism, American sentiment deserves defense. 

Sentiment — the response of the emotions to the ap- 



Sentimental America 5 

peal of human nature — is cheap, but so are many other 
good things. The best of the ancients were rich in it. 
Homer's chieftains wept easily. So did Shakespeare's 
heroes. Adam and Eve shed "some natural tears" 
when they left the Paradise which Milton imagined 
for them. A heart accessible to pathos, to natural 
beauty, to religion, was a chief requisite for the pro- 
tagonist of Victorian literature. Even Becky Sharp 
was touched — once — by Amelia's moving distress. 

Americans, to be sure, do not weep easily; but if they 
make equivalent responses to sentiment, that should 
not be held against them. If we like "sweet" stories, 
or "strong" — which means emotional — stories, our 
taste is not thereby proved to be hopeless, or our 
national character bad. It is better to be creatures 
of even sentimental sentiment with the author of 
"The Rosary," than to see the world only as it is 
portrayed by the pens of Bernard Shaw and Anatole 
France. The first is deplorable; the second is danger- 
ous. I should deeply regret the day when a simple 
story of honest American manhood winning a million 
and a sparkling, piquant sweetheart lost all power to 
lull my critical faculty and warm my heart. I doubt 
whether any literature has ever had too much of honest 
sentiment. 

Good Heavens! Because some among us insist that 
the mystic rose of the emotions shall be painted a 
brighter pink than nature allows, are the rest to forego 
glamour? Or because, to view the matter differently, 
psychology has shown what happens in the brain when 



6 On Fiction 

a man falls in love, and anthropology has traced mar- 
riage to a care for property rights, are we to suspect 
the idyllic in literature wherever we find it? Life 
is full of the idyllic; and no anthropologist will ever 
persuade the reasonably romantic youth that the sweet 
and chivalrous passion which leads him to mingle rever- 
ence with desire for the object of his affections, is noth- 
ing but an idealized property sense. Origins explain 
very little, after all. The bilious critics of sentiment 
in literature have not even honest science behind them. 

I have no quarrel with traffickers in simple emotion 
— with such writers as James Lane Allen and James 
Whitcomb Riley, for example. But the average Ameri- 
can is not content with such sentiment as theirs. He 
wishes a more intoxicating brew, he desires to be per-* 
suaded that, once you step beyond your own experi- 
ence, feeling rules the world. He wishes — I judge by 
what he reads — to make sentiment at least ninety per 
cent efficient, even if a dream- America, superficially 
resemblant to the real, but far different in tone, must 
be created by the obedient writer in order to satisfy 
him. His sentiment has frequently to be sentimental- 
ized before he will pay for it. And to this fault, which 
he shares with other modern races, he adds the other 
heinous sin of sentimentalism, the refusal to face the 
facts. 

This sentimentalizing of reality is far more danger- 
ous than the romantic sentimentalizing of the "squashy" 
variety. It is to be found in sex-stories which care- 
fully observe decency of word and deed, where the 



Sentimental America 7 

conclusion is always in accord with conventional mo- 
rality, yet whose characters are clearly immoral, inde- 
cent, and would so display themselves if the tale were 
truly told. It is to be found in stories of "big business" 
where trickery and rascality are made virtuous at the 
end by sentimental baptism. If I choose for the hero 
of my novel a director in an American trust; if I make 
him an accomplice in certain acts of ruthless economic 
tyranny; if I make it clear that at first he is merely 
subservient to a stronger will; and that the acts he 
approves are in complete disaccord with his private 
moral code — why then, if the facts should be dragged 
to the light, if he is made to realize the exact nature 
of his career, how can I end my story? It is evident 
that my hero possesses little insight and less firniness 
of character. He is not a hero; he is merely a tool. 
In, let us say, eight cases out of ten, his curve is already 
plotted. It leads downward — not necessarily along the 
villain's path, but toward moral insignificance. 

And yet, I cannot end my story that way for Ameri- 
cans. There must be a grand moral revolt. There 
must be resistance, triumph, and not only spiritual, but 
also financial recovery. And this, likewise, is senti- 
mentality. Even Booth Tarkington, in his excellent 
"Turmoil," had to dodge the logical issue of his story; 
had to make his hero exchange a practical literary ideal- 
ism for a very impractical, even though a commercial, 
utopianism, in order to emerge apparently successful 
at the end of the book. A story such as the Danish 
Nexo's 'Telle the Conqueror," where pathos and the 



8 On Fiction 

idyllic, each intense, each beautiful, are made convinc- 
ing by an undeviating truth to experience, would seem 
to be almost impossible of production just now in 
America. 

It is not enough to rail at this false fiction. The 
chief duty of criticism is to explain. The best correc- 
tive of bad writing is a knowledge of why it is bad. 
We get the fiction we deserve, precisely as we get the 
government we deserve — or perhaps, in each case, a 
little better. Why are we sentimental? When that 
question is answered, it is easier to understand the 
defects and the virtues of American fiction. And the 
answer lies in the traditional American philosophy of 
life. 

To say that the American is an idealist is to commit 
a thoroughgoing platitude. Like most platitudes, the 
statement is annoying because from one point of view 
it is indisputably just, while from another it does not 
seem to fit the facts. With regard to our tradition, 
it is indisputable. Of the immigrants who since the 
seventeenth century have been pouring into this conti- 
nent a proportion large in number, larger still in influ- 
ence, has been possessed of motives which in part at 
least were idealistic. If it was not the desire for re- 
ligious freedom that urged them, it was the desire for 
personal freedom; if not political liberty, why then 
economic liberty (for this too is idealism), and the 
opportunity to raise the standard of life. And of 
course all these motives were strongest in that earlier 



Sentimental America 9 

immigration which has done most to fix the state of 
mind and body which we call being American. I need 
not labor the argument. Our political and social his- 
tory support it; our best Hterature demonstrates it, for 
no men have been m^ore idealistic than the American 
writers whom we have consented to call great. Emer- 
son, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Whitman — was idealism 
ever more thoroughly incarnate than in them? 

And this idealism — to risk again a platitude — ^has 
been in the air of America. It has permeated our re- 
ligious sects, and created several of them. It has given 
tone to our thinking, and even more to our feeling. I do 
not say that it has always, or even usually, determined 
our actions, although the Civil War is proof of its 
power. Again and again it has gone aground roughly 
when the ideal met a condition of living — a fact that 
will provide the explanation for which I seek. But 
optimism, "boosting," muck-raking (not all of its man- 
ifestations are pretty), social service, religious, muni- 
cipal, democratic reform, indeed the "uplift" generally, 
is evidence of the vigor, the bumptiousness of the in- 
herited American tendency to pursue the ideal. No one 
can doubt that in 191 8 we believed, at least, in idealism. 

Nevertheless, so far as the average individual is 
concerned, with just his share and no more of the race- 
tendency, this idealism has been suppressed, and in 
some measure perverted. It is this which explains, I 
think, American sentimentalism. 

Consider, for example, the ethics of conventional 
American society. The American ethical tradition is 



lO On Fiction 

perfectly definite and tremendously powerful. It be- 
longs, furthermore, to a population far larger than the 
"old American" stock, for it has been laboriously incul- 
cated in our schools and churches, and impressively 
driven home by newspaper, magazine, and book. I 
shall not presume to analyze it save where it touches 
literature. There it maintains a definite attitude to- 
ward all sex-problems : the Victorian, which is not neces- 
sarily, or even probably, a bad one. Man should be 
chaste, and proud of his chastity. Woman must be so. 
It is the ethical duty of the American to hate, or at 
least to despise, all deviations, and to pretend — for 
the greater prestige of the law — that such sinning is 
exceptional, at least in America. And this is the public 
morality he believes in, whatever may be his private 
experience in actual living. In business, it is the ethi- 
cal tradition of the American, inherited from a rigorous 
Protestant morality, to be square, to play the game 
without trickery, to fight hard but never meanly. 
Over-reaching is justifiable when the other fellow has 
equal opportunities to be "smart"; lying, tyranny — 
never. And though the opposites of all these laudable 
practices come to pass, he must frown on them in 
public, deny their rightness even to the last cock-crow 
— especially in the public press. 

American political history is a long record of ideal- 
istic tendencies toward democracy working painfully 
through a net of graft, pettiness, sectionalism, and 
bravado, with constant disappointment for the idealist 
who believes, traditionally, in the intelligence of the 



Sentimental America il 

crowd. American social history is a glaring instance 
of how the theory of equal dignity for all men can 
entangle itself with caste distinctions, snobbery, and 
the power of wealth. American economic history be- 
trays the pioneer helping to kick down the ladder which 
he himself had raised toward equal opportunity for all. 
American literary history — especially contemporary lit- 
erary history — reflects the result of all this for the 
American mind. The sentimental in our literature is 
a direct consequence. 

The disease is easily acquired. Mr. Smith, a broker, 
finds himself in an environment of "schemes" and 
"deals" in which the quality of mercy is strained, and 
the wind is decidedly not tempered to the shorn lamb. 
After all, business is business. He shrugs his shoulders 
and takes his part. But his unexpended fund of native 
idealism — if, as is most probable, he has his share — 
seeks its due satisfaction. He cannot use it in business; 
so he takes it out in a novel or a play where, quite 
contrary to his observed experience, ordinary people 
like himself act nobly, with a success that is all the 
more agreeable for being unexpected. His wife, a 
woman with strange stirrings about her heart, with 
motions toward beauty, and desires for a significant 
life and rich, satisfying experience, exists in day-long 
pettiness, gossips, frivols, scolds, with money enough 
to do what she pleases, and nothing vital to do. She 
also relieves her pent-up idealism in plays or books — 
in high-wrought, "strong" novels, not in adventures in 
society such as the kitchen admires, but in stories with 



12 On Fiction 

violent moral and emotional crises, whose characters, 
no matter how unlifelike, have "strong" thoughts, and 
make vital decisions; succeed or fail significantly. Her 
brother, the head of a wholesale dry-goods firm, listens 
to the stories the drummers bring home of night life 
on the road, laughs, says to himself regretfully that 
the world has to be like that; and then, in logical re- 
action, demands purity and nothing but aggressive 
purity in the books of the public library. 

The hard man goes in for philanthropy (never before 
so frequently as in America) ; the one-time "boss" takes 
to picture-collecting; the railroad wrecker gathers rare 
editions of the Bible; and tens of thousands of humbler 
Americans carry their inherited idealism into the neces- 
sarily sordid experiences of life in an imperfectly or- 
ganized country, suppress it for fear of being thought 
"cranky" or "soft," and then, in their imagination and 
all that feeds their imagination, give it vent. You may 
watch the process any evening at the "movies" or the 
melodrama, on the trolley-car or in the easy chair at 
home. 

This philosophy of living which I have called Ameri- 
can idealism is in its own nature sound, as is proved in 
a hundred directions where it has had full play. Sup- 
pressed idealism, like any other suppressed desire, be- 
comes unsound. And here lies the ultimate cause of 
the taste for sentimentalism in the American bour- 
geoisie. An undue insistence upon happy endings, re- 
gardless of the premises of the story, and a craving" 



Sentimental America 13 

for optimism everywhere, anyhow, are sure signs of a 
"morbid complex," and to be compared with some 
justice to the craving for drugs in an alcoholic deprived 
of liquor. No one can doubt the effect of the suppres- 
sion by the Puritan discipline of that instinctive love 
of pleasure and liberal experience common to us all. 
Its unhealthy reaction is visible in every old American 
community. No one who faces the facts can deny the 
result of the suppression by commercial, bourgeois, 
prosperous America of our native idealism. The stu- 
dent of society may find its dire effects in politics, in 
religion, and in social intercourse. The critic cannot 
overlook them in literature; for it is in the realm of 
the imagination that idealism, direct or perverted, does 
its best or its worst. 

Sentiment is not perverted idealism. Sentiment is 
idealism, of a mild and not too masculine variety. If 
it has sins, they are sins of omission, not commission. 
Our fondness for sentiment proves that our idealism, if 
a little loose in the waist-band and puffy in the cheeks, 
is still hearty, still capable of active mobilization, like 
those comfortable French husbands whose plump and 
smiling faces, careless of glory, careless of everything 
but thrift and good living, one used to see figured on 
a page whose superscription read, "Dead on the field 
of honor." 

The novels, the plays, the short stories, of sentiment 
may prefer sweetness, perhaps, to truth, the feminine 
to the masculine virtues, but we waste ammunition in 
attacking them. There aiever was, I suppose, a great 



14 On Fiction 

literature of sentiment, for not even "The Sentimental 
Journey" is truly great. But no one can make a diet 
exclusively of "noble" literature; the charming has its 
own cozy corner across from the tragic (and a much 
bigger corner at that). Our uncounted amorists of 
tail-piece song and illustrated story provide the readiest 
means of escape from the somewhat uninspiring life 
that most men and women are living just now in 
America. 

The sentimental, however, — ^whether because of an 
excess of sentiment softening into "slush," or of a mor- 
bid optimism, or of a weak-eyed distortion of the facts 
of life, — is perverted. It needs to be cured, and its 
cure is more truth. But this cure, I very much fear, 
is not entirely, or even chiefly, in the power of the 
"regular practitioner," the honest writer. He can be 
honest; but if he is much more honest than his readers, 
they will not read him. As Professor Lounsbury once 
said, a language grows corrupt only when its speakers 
grow corrupt, and mends, strengthens, and becomes 
pure with them. So with literature. We shall have less 
sentimentality in American literature when our accumu- 
lated store of idealism disappears in a laxer generation; 
or when it finds due vent in a more responsible, less 
narrow, less monotonously prosperous life than is lived 
by the average reader of fiction in America. I would 
rather see our literary taste damned forever than have 
the first alternative become — as it has not yet — a fact. 
The second, in these years rests upon the knees of the 
gods. 



Sentimental America 15 

All this must not be taken in too absolute a sense. 
There are medicines, and good ones, in the hands of 
writers and of critics, to abate, if not to heal, this 
plague of sentimentalism. I have stated ultimate causes 
only. They are enough to keep the mass of Americans 
reading sentimentalized fiction until some fundamental 
change has come, not strong enough to hold back the 
van of American writing, which is steadily moving to- 
ward restraint, sanity, and truth. Every honest com- 
position is a step forward in the cause; and every clear- 
minded criticism. 

But one must doubt the efficacy, and one must doubt 
the healthiness, of reaction into C5micism and sophisti- 
cated cleverness. There are curious signs, especially 
in what we may call the literature of New York, of a 
growing sophistication that sneers at sentiment and the 
sentimental alike. "Magazines of cleverness" have this 
for their keynote, although as yet the satire is not al- 
ways well aimed. There are abundant signs that the 
generation just coming forward will rejoice in such a 
pose. It is observable now in the colleges, where the 
young literati turn up their noses at everything Ameri- 
can, — magazines, best-sellers, or one-hundred-night 
plays, — and resort for inspiration to the English school 
of anti-Victorians: to Remy de Gourmont, to Anatole 
France. Their pose is not altogether to be blamed, and 
the men to whom they resort are models of much that 
is admirable; but there is little promise for American 
literature in exotic imitation. To see ourselves prevail- 
ingly as others see us may be good for modesty, but 



1 6 On Fiction 

does not lead to a self-confident native art. And it is 
a dangerous way for Americans to travel. We cannot 
afford such sophistication yet. The English wits experi- 
mented with cynicism in the court of Charles II, 
laughed at blundering Puritan morality, laughed at 
country manners, and were whiffed away because the 
ideals they laughed at were better than their own. 
Idealism is not funny, however censurable its excesses. 
As a race we have too much sentiment to be frightened 
out of the sentimental by a blase cynicism. 

At first glance the flood of moral literature now 
upon us — social-conscience stories, scientific plays, plat- 
itudinous "moralities" that tell us how to live — may 
seem to be another protest against sentimentalism. And 
that the French and English examples have been so 
warmly welcomed here may seem another indication 
of a reaction on our part. I refer especially to "hard'' 
stories, full of vengeful wrath, full of warnings for 
the race that dodges the facts of life. H. G. Wells is 
the great exemplar, with his sociological studies 
wrapped in description and tied with a plot. In a 
sense, such stories are certainly to be regarded as a 
protest against truth-dodging, against cheap optimism, 
against "slacking," whether in literature or in life. 
But it would be equally just to call them another re- 
sult of suppressed idealism, and to regard their popu- 
larity in America as proof of the argument which I have 
advanced in this essay. Excessively didactic literature 
is often a little unhealthy. In fresh periods, v/hen life 
runs strong and both ideals and passions find ready 



i 



Sentimental America 17 

issue into life, literature has no burdensome moral to 
carry. It digests its moral. Homer digested his morals. 
They transfuse his epics. So did Shakespeare. 

Not so with the writers of the social-conscience 
school. They are in a rage over wicked, wasteful man. 
Their novels are bursted notebooks — sometimes neat 
and orderly notebooks, like Mr. Galsworthy's or our 
own Ernest Poole's, sometimes haphazard ones, like 
those of Mr. Wells, but always explosive with reform. 
These gentlemen know very well what they are about, 
especially Mr. Wells, the lesser artist, perhaps, as com- 
pared with Galsworthy, but the shrewder and possibly 
the greater man. The very sentimentalists, who go to 
novels to exercise the idealism which they cannot use 
in life, will read these unsentimental stories, although 
their lazy impulses would never spur them on toward 
any truth not sweetened by a tale. 

And yet, one feels that the social attack might have 
been more convincing if free from its compulsory serv- 
ice to fiction; that these novels and plays might have 
been better literature if the authors did not study 
life in order that they might be better able to preach. 
Wells and Galsworthy also have suffered from sup- 
pressed idealism, although it would be unfair to say 
that perversion was the result. So have our muck- 
rakers, who, very characteristically, exhibit the dis- 
order in a more complex and a much more serious form, 
since to a distortion of facts they have often enough 
added hypocrisy and commercialism. It is part of the 
price we pay for being sentimental. 



1 8 On Fiction 

If I am correct in my analysis, we are suffering here 
in America, not from a plague of bad taste merely, nor 
only from a lack of real education among our myriads 
of readers, nor from decadence — least of all, this last. 
It is a disease of our own particular virtue which has in- 
fected us—idealism, suppressed and perverted. A less 
commercial, more responsible America, perhaps a less 
prosperous and more spiritual America, will hold fast 
to its sentiment, but be weaned from its sentimentality. 



Free Fiction 

What impresses me most in the contemporary short 
story as I find it in American magazines, is its curious 
sophistication. Its bloom is gone. I have read through 
dozens of periodicals without finding one with fresh 
feeling and the easy touch of the writer who writes be- 
cause his story urges him. And when with relief I do 
encounter a narrative that is not conventional in struc- 
ture and mechanical in its effects, the name of the 
author is almost invariably that of a newcomer, or of 
one of our few uncorrupted masters of the art. Still 
more remarkable, the good short stories that I meet 
with in my reading are the trivial ones, — the sketchy, 
the anecdotal, the merely adventurous or merely pic- 
turesque; as they mount toward literature they seem 
to increase in artificiality and constraint; when they 
propose to interpret life they become machines, and 
nothing more, for the discharge of sensation, sentiment, 
or romance. And this is true, so far as I can discover, 
of the stories which most critics and more editors be- 
lieve to be successful, the stories which are most char- 
acteristic of m.agazine narrative and of the output of 
American fiction in our times. 

I can take my text from any magazine, from the most 
literary to the least. In the stories selected by all of 
them I find the resemblances greater than the differ- 

19 



20 On Fiction 

ences, and the latter seldom amount to more than a 
greater or a less excellence of workmanship and style. 
The "literary" magazines, it is true, more frequently 
surprise one by a story told with original and consum- 
mate art; but then the "popular" magazines balance 
this merit by their more frequent escape from mere 
prettiness. In both kinds, the majority of the stories 
come from the same mill, even though the minds that 
shape them may differ in refinement and in taste. Their 
range is narrow, and, what is more damning, their art 
seems constantly to verge upon artificiality. 

These made- to-order stories (and this is certainly 
not too strong a term for the majority of them) are not 
interesting to a critical reader. He sticks to the novel, 
or, more frequently, goes to France, to Russia, or to 
England for his fiction, as the sales-list of any progres- 
sive publisher will show. And I do not believe that 
they are deeply interesting to an uncritical reader. He 
reads them to pass the time; and, to judge from the 
magazines themselves, gives his more serious attention 
to the "write-ups" of politics, current events, new dis- 
coveries, and men in the public eye, — to reality, in other 
words, written as if it were fiction, and more interesting 
than the fiction that accompanies it, because, in spite of 
its enlivening garb, it is guaranteed by writer and editor 
to be true. I am not impressed by the perfervid letters 
published by the editor in praise of somebody's story 
as a "soul-cure," or the greatest of the decade. They 
were written, I suppose, but they are not typical. They 
do not insult the intelligence as do the ridiculous puffs 



Free Fiction 21 

which it is now the fashion to place like a sickly lime- 
light at the head of a story; but they do not convince 
me of the story's success with the public. Actually, 
men and women^ discussing these magazines, seldom 
speak of the stories. They have been interested, — in 
a measure. The "formula," as I shall show later, is 
bound to get that result. But they have dismissed the 
characters and forgotten the plots. 

I do not deny that this supposedly successful short 
story is easy to read. It is — fatally easy. And here 
precisely is the trouble. To borrow a term from dra- 
matic criticism, it is "well made," and that is what 
makes it so thin, so bloodless, and so unprofitable to 
remember, in spite of its easy narrative and its 
"punch." Its success as literature, curiously enough for 
a new literature and a new race like ours, is limited, 
not by crudity, or inexpressiveness, but by form, by 
the very rigidity of its carefully perfected form. Like 
other patent medicines, it is constructed by formula. 

It is not difficult to construct an outline of the "for- 
mula" by which thousands of current narratives are 
being whipped into shape. Indeed, by turning to the 
nearest textbook on "Selling the Short Story," I could 
find one ready-made. (There could be no clearer 
symptom of the disease I wish to diagnose than these 
many "practical" textbooks, with their over-emphasis 
upon technique and their under-estimate of all else 
that makes literature.) The story must begin, it ap- 
pears, with action or with dialogue. A mother packs 



22 On Fiction 

her son's trunk while she gives him unheeded advice 
mingled with questions about shirts and socks; a cor- 
rupt and infuriated director pounds on the mahogany 
table at his board meeting, and curses the honest fool 
(hero of the story) who has got in his way; or, 
" 'Where did Mary Worden get that curious gown?' in- 
quired Mrs. Van Deming, glancing across the sparkling 
glass and silver of the hotel terrace." Any one of these 
will serve as instance of the break-neck beginning which 
Kipling made obligatory. Once started, the narrative 
must move, move, move furiously, each action and 
every speech pointing directly toward the unknown 
climax. A pause is a confession of weakness. This 
Poe taught for a special kind of story; and this a later 
generation, with a servility which would have amazed 
that sturdy fighter, requires of all narrative. Then 
the climax, which must neatly, quickly, and definitely 
end the action for all time, either by a solution you have 
been urged to hope for by the wily author in every pre- 
ceding paragraph, or in a way which is logically cor- 
rect but never, never suspected. O. Henry is respon- 
sible for the vogue of the latter of these two alterna- 
tives, — and the strain of living up to his inventiveness 
has been frightful. Finally comes a last suspiration, 
usually in the advertising pages. Sometimes it is a 
beautiful descriptive sentence charged with sentiment, 
sometimes a smart epigram, according to the style of 
story, or the ''line" expected of the author. Try this, 
as the advertisements say, on your favorite magazine. 
This formula, with variations which readers can sup- 



Free Fiction 23 

ply for themselves or draw from textbooks on the short 
story, is not a wholly bad method of writing fiction. 
It is, I venture to assert, a very good one, — if you de- 
sire merely effective story-telling. It is probably the 
best way of making the short story a thoroughly effi- 
cient tool for the presentation of modern life. And 
there lies, I believe, the whole trouble. The short 
story, its course plotted and its form prescribed, has be- 
come too efficient. Now efficiency is all that we ask of 
a railroad, efficiency is half at least of what we ask of 
journalism; but efficiency is not the most, it is perhaps 
the least, important among the undoubted elements of 
good literature. 

In order to make the short story efficient, the dia- 
logue, the setting, the plot, the character development, 
have been squeezed and whittled and moulded until the 
means of telling the story fit the ends of the story-telling 
as neatly as hook fits eye. As one writer on how to 
manufacture short stories tells us in discussing charac- 
ter development, the aspirant must — 

"Eliminate every trait or deed which does not help 
peculiarly to make the character's part in the particular 
story either intelligible or open to such sympathy as 
it merits; 

"Paint in only the 'high lights,' that is . . . never 
qualify or elaborate a trait or episode, merely for the 
sake of preserving the effect of the character's full 
reality." 

And thus the story is to be subdued to the service 
of the climax as the body of man to his brain. 



24 On Fiction 

But what these writers upon the short story do not 
tell us is that efficiency of this order works backward 
as well as forward. If means are to correspond with 
ends, why then ends must be adjusted to means. Not 
only must the devices of the story-teller be directed 
with sincerity toward the tremendous effect he wishes 
to make with his climax upon you and me, his readers; 
but the interesting life which it is or should be his pur- 
pose to write about for our delectation must be ma- 
noeuvered, or must be chosen or rejected, not accord- 
ing to the limitation which small space imposes, but 
with its suitability to the "formula" in mind. In brief, 
if we are to have complete efficiency, the right kind of 
life and no other must be put into the short-story hop- 
per. Nothing which cannot be told rapidly must be 
dropped in, lest it clog the smoothly spinning wheels. 
If it is a story of slowly developing incongruity in mar- 
ried life, the action must be speeded beyond proba- 
bility, like a film in the moving pictures, before it is 
ready to be made into a short story. If it is a tale of 
disillusionment on a prairie farm, with the world and 
life flattening out together, some sharp climax must be 
provided nevertheless, because that is the only way in 
which to tell a story. Indeed it is easy to see the dan- 
gers which arise from sacrificing truth to a formula 
in the interests of efficiency. 

This is the limitation by form; the limitation by 
subject is quite as annoying. American writers from 
Poe down have been fertile in plots. Especially since 
O. Henry took the place of Kipling as a literary mas- 



Free Fiction 25 

ter, ingenuity, inventiveness, cleverness in its American 
sense, have been squandered upon the short story. But 
plots do not make variety. Themes make variety. 
Human nature regarded in its multitudinous phases 
makes variety. There are only a few themes in current 
American short stories, — the sentimental theme from 
which breed ten thousand narratives; the theme of in- 
tellectual analysis and of moral psychology favored by 
the ''literary" magazines; the "big-business" theme; 
the theme of American effrontery; the social-contrast 
theme; the theme of successful crime. Add a few 
more, and you will have them all. Read a hundred ex- 
amples, and you will see how infallibly the authors — 
always excepting our few masters — limit themselves to 
conventional aspects of even these conventional themes. 
Reflect, and you will see how the first — the theme of 
sentiment — ^has overflowed its banks and washed over 
all the rest, so that, whatever else a story may be, it 
must somewhere, somehow, make the honest American 
heart beat more softly. 

There is an obvious cause for this in the taste of the 
American public, which I do not propose to neglect. 
But here too we are in the grip of the "formula," of 
the idea that there is only one way to construct a short 
story — a swift succession of climaxes rising precipi- 
tously to a giddy eminence. For the formula is rigid, 
not plastic as Hfe is plastic. It fails to grasp innumer- 
able stories which break the surface of American life 
day by day and disappear uncaught. Stories of quiet 
homely life, events significant for themselves that never 



26 On Fiction 

reach a burning climax, situations that end in irony, or 
doubt, or aspiration, it mars in the telling. The method 
which makes story-telling easy, itself limits our variety. 

Nothing brings home the artificiality and the narrow- 
ness of this American fiction so clearly as a compari- 
son, for better and for worse, with the Russian short 
story. I have in mind the works of Anton Tchekoff, 
whose short stories have now been translated into excel- 
lent English. Fresh from a reading of these books, one 
feels, it is true, quite as inclined to criticize as to praise. 
Why are the characters therein depicted so persistently 
disagreeable, even in the lighter stories? Why are the 
women always freckled, the men predominantly red and 
watery in the eye? Why is the country so flat, so foggy, 
so desolate; and why are the peasants so lumpish and 
miserable? Russia before the Revolution could not 
have been so dreary as this; the prevailing grimness 
must be due to some mental obfuscation of her writers. 
I do not refer to the gloomy, powerful realism of the 
stories of hopeless misery. There, if one criticizes, it 
must be only the advisabihty of the choice of such sub- 
jects. One does not doubt the truth of the picture. I 
mean the needless dinginess of much of Russian fiction, 
and of many of these powerful short stories. 

Nevertheless, when one has said his worst, and par- 
ticularly when he has eliminated the dingier stories of 
the collection, he returns with an admiration, almost 
passionate, to the truth, the variety, above all to the 
freedom of these stories. I do not know Russia or the 
Russians, and yet I am as sure of the absolute truth 



Free Fiction 27 

of that unfortunate doctor in "La Cigale," who builds 
up his heroic Hfe of self-sacrifice while his wife seeks 
selfishly elsewhere for a hero, as I am convinced of the 
essential unreality, except in dialect and manners, of 
the detectives, the "dope-fiends," the hard business 
men, the heroic boys and lovely girls that people most 
American short stories. As for variety, — the Russian 
does not handle numerous themes. He is obsessed with 
the dreariness of life, and his obsession is only 
occasionally Hfted; he has no room to wander widely 
through human nature. And yet his work gives an im- 
pression of variety that the American magazine never 
attains. He is free to be various. When the mood of 
gloom is off him, he experiments at will, and often with 
consummate success. He seems to be sublimely uncon- 
scious that readers are supposed to like only a few 
kinds of stories ; and as unaware of the taboo upon re- 
ligious or reflective narrative as of the prohibition upon 
the ugly in fiction. As life in any manifestation be- 
comes interesting in his eyes, his pen moves freely. And 
so he makes life interesting in many varieties, even 
when his Russian prepossessions lead him far away 
from our Western moods. 

Freedom. That is the word here, and also in his 
method of telling these stories. No one seems to have 
said to Tchekoff, "Your stories must move, move, 
move." Sometimes, indeed, he pauses outright, as life 
pauses ; sometimes he seems to turn aside, as life turns 
aside before its progress is resumed. No one has ever 
made clear to him that every word from the first of 



28 On Fiction 

the story must point unerringly toward the solution 
and the effect of the plot. His paragraphs spring from 
the characters and the situation. They are led on to 
the climax by the story itself. They do not drag the 
panting reader down a rapid action, to fling kim breath- 
less upon the "I told you so" of a conclusion prepared 
in advance. 

I have in mind especially a story of Tchekoff's called 
"The Night Before Easter." It is a very interesting 
story; it is a very admirable story, conveying in a few 
pages much of Russian spirituality and more of uni- 
versal human nature; but I believe that all, or nearly 
all, of our American magazines would refuse it; not be- 
cause it lacks picturesqueness, or narrative suspense, or 
vivid characterization — all of these it has in large meas- 
ure. They would reject it because it does not seem to 
move rapidly, or because it lacks a vigorous climax. 
The Goltva swollen in flood lies under the Easter stars. 
As the monk Jerome ferries the traveler over to where 
fire and cannon-shot and rocket announce the rising of 
Christ to the riotous monastery, he asks, "Can you tell 
me, kind master, why it is that even in the presence of 
great happiness a man cannot forget his grief?" Dea- 
con Nicholas is dead, who alone in the monastery could 
write prayers that touched the heart. And of them all, 
only Jerome read his "akaphists." "He used to open 
the door of his cell and make me sit by him, and we 
used to read. . . . His face was compassionate and 
tender — " In the monastery the countryside is crowd- 
ing to hear the Easter service. The choir sings "Lift 



Free Fiction 29 

up thine eyes, Zion, and behold." But Nicholas is 
dead, and there is none to penetrate the meaning of the 
Easter canon, except Jerome who toils all night on the 
ferry because they had forgotten him. In the morning, 
the traveler recrosses the Goltva. Jerome is still on the 
ferry. He rests his dim, timid eyes upon them all, and 
then fixes his gaze on the rosy face of a merchant's wife. 
There is little of the man in that long gaze. He is seek- 
ing in the woman's face the sweet and gentle features 
of his lost friend. 

The American editor refuses such a story. There is 
no plot here, he says, and no "punch." He is wrong, 
although an imperfect abstract like mine cannot con- 
vict him. For the narrative presents an unforgettable 
portrait of wistful hero-worship, set in the dim mists 
of a Russian river against the barbaric splendor of an 
Easter midnight mass. To force a climax upon this 
poignant story would be to spoil it. And when it ap- 
pears, as it will, in reprint, in some periodical anthology 
of current fiction, it will not fail to impress American 
readers. 

But the American editor must have a climax which 
drives home what he thinks the public wants. If it is 
not true, so much the worse for truth. If it falsifies 
the story, well, a l)^ng story with a "punch" is better 
than a true one that lacks a fire-spitting climax. The 
audience which judge a play by the effect of its "cur- 
tain," will not complain of a trifling illogicality in nar- 
rative, or a little juggling with what might happen if 
the story were life. Of what the editor wants I find a 



30 On Fiction 

typical example in a recent number of a popular maga- 
zine. The story is well written; it is interesting until 
it begins to lie; moreover it is "featured" as one of the 
best short stories of the year. An American girl, 
brought up in luxury, has fed her heart with romantic 
sentiment. The world is a Christmas tree. If you are 
good and pretty and "nice," you have only to wait 
until you get big enough to shake it, and then down will 
come some present — respect from one's friends and 
family, perhaps a lover. And then she wakes up. Her 
father points out that she is pinching him by her ex- 
travagance. Nobody seems to want her kind of "nice- 
ness"; which indeed does no one much good. There is 
nothing that she can do that is useful in the world, for 
she has never learned. She begins to doubt the 
Christmas tree. There enters a man — a young electri- 
cal engineer, highly trained, highly ambitious, but 
caught in the wheels of a great corporation where he is 
merely a cog; wanting to live, wanting to love, wanting 
to be married, yet condemned to labor for many years 
more upon a salary which perhaps would little more 
than pay for her clothes. By an ingenious device they 
are thrown together in a bit of wild country near town, 
and are made to exchange confidences. So far, no one 
can complain of the truth of this story; and further- 
more it is well told. Here are two products of our so- 
cial machine, both true to t3^e. Suppose they want 
to marry? What can we do about it? The story- teller 
has posed his question with a force not to be denied. 



Free Fiction 31 

But I wish we had had a Tchekoff to answer it. As 
for this author, he leads his characters to a conveniently 
deserted house, lights a fire on the hearth, sets water 
boiling for tea, and in a few pages of charming romance 
would persuade us that with a few economies in this 
rural residence, true love may have its course and a 
successful marriage crown the morning's adventure. 
Thus in one dazzling sweep, the greatest and most 
sugary plum of all drops from the very tip of the 
Christmas tree into the lap of the lady, who had just 
learned that happiness in the real world comes in no 
such haphazard and undeserved a fashion. Really! 
have we degenerated from Lincoln's day? Is it easy 
now to fool all of us all of the time, so that a tale-teller 
dares to expose silly romance at the beginning of his 
story, and yet dose us with it at the end? Not that 
one objects to romance. It is as necessary as food, and 
almost as valuable. But romance that pretends to be 
realism, realism that fizzles out into sentimental ro- 
mance — is there any excuse for that? Even if it pro- 
vides "heart interest" and an effective climax? 

The truth is, of course, that the Russian stories are 
based upon life; the typical stories of the American 
magazines, for all their realistic details, are too often 
studied, not from American life but from literary con- 
vention. Even when their substance is fresh, their un- 
foldings and above all their solutions are second-hand. 
If the Russian authors could write American stories I 
believe that their work would be more truly popular 
than what we are now getting. They would be free to 



32 On Fiction 

be interesting in any direction and by any method. The 
writer of the American short story is not free. 

I should like to leave the subject here with a com- 
parison that any reader can make for himself. But 
American pride recalls the past glory of our short 
story, and common knowledge indicates the present 
reality of a few authors — several of them women — who 
are writing fiction of which any race might be proud. 
The optimist cannot resist meditating on the way out 
for our enslaved short story. 

The ultimate responsibility for its present position 
must fall, I suppose, upon our American taste, which, 
when taken by and large, is unquestionably crude, 
easily satisfied, and not sensitive to good things. Ameri- 
can taste does not rebel against the "formula." If in- 
terest is pricked it does not inquire too curiously into 
the nature of the goad. American taste is partial to 
sentiment, and antagonistic to themes that fail to pre- 
sent the American in the light of optimistic romance. 
But our defects in taste are slowly but certainly being 
remedied. The schools are at work upon them; 
journalism, for all its noisy vulgarity, is at work upon 
them. Our taste in art, our taste in poetry, our taste 
in architecture, our taste in music go up, as our taste 
in magazine fiction seems to go down. 

But what are the writers of short stories and what 
are the editors and publishers doing to help taste im- 
prove itself until, as Henry James says, it acquires a 
keener relish than ever before? 



Free Fiction 33 

It profits nothing to attack the American writer. 
He does, it may fairly be assumed, what he can, and I 
do not wish to discuss here the responsibility of the 
public for his deficiencies. The editor and the pub- 
lisher, however, stand in a somewhat different relation- 
ship to the American short story. They may assert 
with much justice that they are public servants merely; 
nevertheless they do control the organs of literary ex- 
pression, and it is through them that any positive in- 
fluence on the side of restriction or proscription must 
be exerted, whatever may be its ultimate source. If a 
lack of freedom in method and in choice of subject is 
one reason for the sophistication of our short story, 
then the editorial policy of American magazines is a 
legitimate field for speculation. 

I can reason only from the evidence of the product 
and the testimony of authors, successful and unsuccess- 
ful. Yet one conclusion springs to the eye, and is 
enough in itself to justify investigation. The critical 
basis upon which the American editor professes to 
build his magazine is of doubtful validity. I believe 
that it is unsound. His policy, as stated in "editorial 
announcements" and confirmed by his advertisements 
of the material he selects, is first to find out what the 
public wants, and next to supply it. This is reason- 
able in appearance. It would seem to be good com- 
mercially, and, as a policy, I should consider it good 
for art, which must consult the popular taste or lose its 
vitality. But a pitfall lies between this theory of edi- 
torial selection and its successful practice. The editor 



34 On Fiction 

must really know what the public wants. If he does 
not, he becomes a dogmatic critic of a very dangerous 
school. 

Those who know the theater and its playwrights, 
are agreed that the dramatic manager, at least in 
America, is a very poor judge of what the public de- 
sires. The percentage of bad guesses in every metro- 
politan season is said to be very high. Is the editor 
more competent? It would seem that he is, to judge 
from the stability of our popular magazines. But that 
he follows the public taste with any certainty of judg- 
ment is rendered unlikely, not only by inherent improb- 
ability, but also by three specific facts: the tiresome 
succession of like stories which follow unendingly in 
the wake of every popular success; the palpable fear 
of the editor to attempt innovation, experiment, or 
leadership; and the general complaint against "maga- 
zine stories." In truth, the American editor plays safe, 
constantly and from conviction; and playing safe in 
the short story means the adoption of the "formula," 
which is sure to be somewhat successful; it means re- 
striction to a few safe themes. He swings from the 
detective story to the tale of the alien, from the "heart- 
interest" story to the narrative of "big business." 
When, as has happened recently, a magazine experi- 
mented with eroticism, and found it successful, the 
initiative of its editor was felt to be worthy of general 
remark. 

If one reduces this imperfect sketch of existing con- 
ditions to terms of literary criticism, the result is in- 



Free Fiction 35 

teresting. There are two great schools of criticism: 
the judicial and the impressionistic. The judicial critic 
— a Boileau, a Matthew Arnold — bases his criticism 
upon fundamental principles. The impressionistic 
critic follows the now hackneyed advice of Anatole 
France, to let his soul adventure among masterpieces, 
and seeks the reaction for good or bad of a given work 
upon his own finely strung mind. The first group 
must be sure of the breadth, the soundness, and the 
just application of their principles. The second group 
must depend upon their o>vn good taste. 

The American editor Las flung aside as archaic the 
fundamental principles of criticism upon which judicial 
critics have based their opinions. And yet he has 
chosen to be dogmatic. He has transformed his guess 
as to what the public wants into a fundamental prin- 
ciple, and acted upon it with the confidence of an Aris- 
totle. He asserts freely and frankly that, in his pri- 
vate capacity, such and such a story pleases him, is 
good (privately he is an impressionist and holds opin- 
ions far more valid than his editorial judgment, since 
they are founded upon taste and not upon intuition 
merely) ; but that "the public will not like it," or "in 
our rivalry with seventy other magazines we cannot 
afford to print this excellent work." He is frequently 
right. He is also frequently wrong. 

I speak not from personal experience, since other 
reasons in my own case have usually, though not 
always, led me to agree with the editor's verdict, when 
it has been unfavorable; but from the broader testi- 



36 On Fiction 

mony of many writers, the indisputable evidence of 
works thus rejected which have later attained success, 
and the failure of American short fiction to im.press 
permanently the reading public. Based upon an in- 
tuition of the public mind, changing with the wind, — 
always after, never before it, — such editorial judgment, 
indeed, must be of doubtful validity; must lead in many 
instances to unwise and unprofitable restrictions upon 
originality in fiction. 

I am well aware that it is useless to consider current 
American literature without regard to the multitude 
of readers who, being, like all multitude, mediocre, de- 
mand the mediocre in literature. And I know that it is 
equally foolish to neglect the popular elements in the 
developing American genius — that genius which is so 
colloquial now, and yet so inventive; so vulgar some- 
times, and yet, when sophistication is not forced upon 
it, so fresh. I have no wish to evade the necessity for 
consulting the wishes and the taste of the public, which 
good sense and commercial necessity alike impose upon 
the editor. I would not have the American editor less 
practical, less sensitive to the popular wave; I would 
have him more so. But I would have him less dog- 
matic. All forms of dogmatism are dangerous for men 
whose business it is to publish, not to criticize, con- 
temporary literature. But an unsound and arbitrary 
dogmatism is the worst. If the editor is to give the 
people what they want instead of what they have 
wanted, he must have more confidence in himself, and 
more belief in their capacity for liking the good. He 



Free Fiction 37 

should be dogmatic only where he can be sure. Else- 
where let him follow the method of science, and experi- 
ment. He should trust to his taste in practice as well 
as in private theory, and let the results of such criti- 
cism sometimes, at least, dominate his choice. 

In both our "popular" and our "literary" magazines, 
freer fiction would follow upon better criticism. The 
readers of the "literary" magazines are already seek- 
ing foreign-made narratives, and neglecting the Ameri- 
can short story built for them according to the stand- 
ardized model. The readers of the "popular" maga- 
zines want chiefly journalism (an utterly different 
thing from literature); and that they are getting in 
good measure in the non-fiction and part-fiction sec- 
tions of the magazines. But they also seek, as all men 
seek, some Hterature. If, instead of imposing the 
"formula" (which is, after all, a journalistic mech- 
anism — and a good one — adapted for speedy and 
evanescent effects), if, instead of imposing the "for- 
mula" upon all the subjects they propose to have turned 
into fiction, the editors of these magazines should also 
experiment, should release some subjects from the 
tyranny of the "formula," and admit others which its 
cult has kept out, the result might be surprising. It 
is true that the masses have no taste for literature, — 
as a steady diet; it is still more certain that not even 
the most mediocre of multitudes can be permanently 
hoodwinked by formula. 

But the magazines can take care of themselves; it is 
the sh(xt story in which I am chiefly interested. Bet- 



38 On Fiction 

ter criticism and greater freedom for fiction might 
vitalize our overabundant, unoriginal, unreal, unversa- 
tile, — everything but unformed short story. Its artifice 
might again become art. Even the more careful, the 
more artistic work leaves one with the impression that 
these stories have sought a "line," and found an ac- 
ceptable formula. And when one thinks of the multi- 
tudinous situations, impressions, incidents in this fas- 
cinating whirl of modern life, incapable perhaps of 
presentation in a novel because of their very imperma- 
nence, admirably adapted to the short story because of 
their vividness and their deep if narrow significance, 
the voice of protest must go up against any artificial, 
arbitrary limitations upon the art. Freedom to make 
his appeal to the public with any subject not morbid 
or indecent, is all the writer can ask. Freedom to pub- 
lish sometimes what the editor likes and the public 
may like, instead of what the editor approves because 
the public has liked it, is all that he needs. There is 
plenty of blood in the American short story yet, though 
I have read through whole magazines without finding 
a drop of it. 

When we give literature in America the same oppor- 
tunity to invent, to experiment, that we have already 
given journalism, there will be more legitimate suc- 
cessors to Irving, to Hawthorne, to Poe and Bret Harte. 
There will be more writers, like O. Henry, who write 
stories to please themselves, and thus please the ma- 
jority. There will be fewer writers, like O. Henry, 
who stop short of the j&nal touch of perfection because 



Free Fiction 39 

American taste (and the American editor) puts no 
premium upon artistic work. There will be fewer 
stories, I trust, where sentiment is no longer a part, but 
the whole of life. Most of all, form, the form, the 
formula, will relax its grip upon the short story, will 
cease its endless tapping upon the door of interest, and 
its smug content when some underling (while the brain 
sleeps) answers its stereotyped appeal. And we may 
get more narratives like Mrs. Wharton's "Ethan 
Frome," to make us feel that now as much as ever there 
is literary genius waiting in America. 



A Certain Condescension Toward 
Fiction 

If only the reader of novels would say what he thinks 
about fiction! If only the dead hand of hereditary 
opinion did not grasp and distort what he feels! But 
he exercises a judgment that is not independent. 
Books, hke persons, he estimates as much by the tra- 
ditional reputation of the families they happen to be 
born in as by the merits they may themselves possess, 
and the traditional reputation of the novel in English 
has been bad. 

Poetry has a most respectable tradition. Even now, 
when the realistic capering of free verse has embold- 
ened the ordinary man to speak his mind freely, a re- 
viewer hesitates to apply even to bad poetry so undigni- 
fied a word as trash. The essay family is equally re- 
spectable, to be noticed, when noticed at all, with some 
of the reverence due to an ancient and dignified art. 
The sermon family, still numerous to a degree incredi- 
ble to those who do not study the lists of new books, 
is so eminently respectable that few dare to abuse even 
its most futile members. But the novel was given a 
bad name in its youth that has overshadowed its suc- 
cessful maturity. 

Our ancestors are much to blame. For centuries 
they held the novel suspect as a kind of bastard litera- 

40 



A Certain Condescension 41 

ture, probably immoral, and certainly dangerous to in- 
tellectual health. But they are no more deeply respon- 
sible for our suppressed contempt of fiction than weak- 
kneed novelists who for many generations have striven 
to persuade the English reader that a good story was 
really a sermon, or a lecture on ethics, or a tract on 
economics or moral psychology, in disguise. Bernard 
Shaw, in his prefaces to the fiction that he succeeds in 
making dramatic, is carrying on a tradition that 
Chaucer practised before him: 

And ye that holden this tale a folye, — 
As of a fox, or of a cok and hen, — 
Taketh the moralite, good men. 

And that was the way they went at it for centuries, 
always pretending, always driven to pretend, that a 
good story was not good enough to be worth telling for 
itself alone, but must convey a moral or a satire or an 
awful lesson, or anything that might separate it from 
the ''just fiction'' that only the immoral and the frivo- 
lous among their contemporaries read or wrote. To- 
day we pay the price. 

William Painter, her Majesty Queen Elizabeth's 
clerk of ordnance in the Tower^ is an excellent instance. 
Stricken by a moral panic, he advertised that from his 
delectable "Palace of Pleasure" the young might 
"learne how to avoyde the ruine, overthrow, inconven- 
ience and displeasure, that lascivious desire and wanton 
evil doth bring to their suters and pursuers" — a disin- 
genuous sop to the Puritans. His contemporary, 



42 On Fiction 

Geoffrey Fenton, who also turned to story-making, 
opines that in histories ^'the dignitye of vertue and 
fowelenes of vice appereth muche more lyvelye then 
in any morall teachynge/' although he knew that his 
"histories" were the sheerest, if not the purest, of fic- 
tion, with any moral purpose that might exist chiefly 
of his own creating. A century and more later Eliza 
Haywood, the ambiguous author of many ambiguous 
novels of the eighteenth century, prefaces her "Life's 
Progress Through the Passions" (an ambiguous title) 
with hke hypocrisy: "I am enemy to all romances, 
novels, and whatever carries the air of them. ... It 
is a real, not a fictitious character I am about to pre- 
sent" — which is merely another instance of fiction dis- 
guising itself, this time, I regret to say, as immorality 
in real life. And so they all go, forever implying that 
fiction is frivolous or immoral or worthless, until it is 
not surprising that, as Mr. Bradsher has reminded us, 
the elder Timothy Dwight of Yale College was able to 
assert, "Between the Bible and novels there is a gulf 
fixed which few novel-readers are willing to pass." 
Richardson was forced to defend himself, so was Sterne, 
so was Fielding, so was Goldsmith. Dr. Johnson was 
evidently making concessions when he advised ro- 
mances as reading for youth. Jeffrey, the critic and 
tyrant of the next century, summed it all up when he 
wrote that novels are "generally regarded as among the 
lower productions of our literature." And this is the 
reputation that the novel family has brought with it 
even down to our day. 



A Certain Condescension 43 

The nineteenth century was worse, if anything, than 
earlier periods, for it furthered what might be called 
the evangelistic slant toward novel-reading, the attitude 
that neatly classified this form of self-indulgence with 
dancing, card-playing, hard drinking, and loose living 
of every description. It is true that the intellectuals 
and worldly folk in general did not share this prejudice. 
Walter Scott had made novel-reading common among 
the well-read; but the narrower sectarians in England, 
the people of the back country and the small towns in 
America, learned to regard the novel as unprofitable, 
if not positively leading toward ungodliness, and their 
unnumbered descendants make up the vast army of 
uncritical readers for which Grub Street strives and 
sweats to-day. They no longer abstain and condemn; 
instead, they patronize and distrust. 

All this — and far more, for I have merely sketched 
in a long and painful history — is the background sel- 
dom remembered when we wonder at the easy conde- 
scension of the American toward his innumerable 
novels. 

The fact of his condescension is not so well recog- 
nized as it deserves to be. Indeed, condescension may 
not seem to be an appropriate term for the passionate 
devouring of romance that one can see going on any 
day in the trolley-cars, or the tense seriousness with 
which some readers regard certain novelists whose 
pages have a message for the world. True, the term 
will not stretch thus far. But it is condescension that 
has made the trouble, as I shall try to prove; for all 



44 On Fiction 

of us, even the tense ones, do patronize that creative 
instinct playing upon life as it is which in all times 
and everywhere is the very essence of fiction. 

How absurd that here in America we should conde- 
scend toward our fiction ! How ridiculous in a country 
even yet so weak and poor and crude in the arts, which 
has contributed so little to the world's store of all that 
makes fine living for the mind! What a laughable 
parallel of the cock and the gem he found and left 
upon the dung-heap, if we could be proved not to be 
proud of American fiction! For if the novel and the 
short story should be left out of America's slender con- 
tribution to world literature, the offering would be a 
small one. Some poetry of Whitman's and of Poe's, 
some essays of Emerson, a little Thoreau, and what 
important besides? Hawthorne would be left from the 
count, the best exemplar of the fine art of moral narra- 
tive in any language; Henry James would be left out, 
the master of them all in psychological character analy- 
sis; Poe the story-teller would be missing, and the art 
of the modern short story, which in English stems from 
him; Cooper would be lost from our accounting, for 
all his crudities the best historical novelist after Scott; 
Mark Twain, Howells, Bret Harte, Irving! The at- 
tempt to exalt American literature is grateful if one 
begins upon fiction. 

And how absurd to patronize, to treat with indiffer- 
ent superiority just because they are members of the 
novel family, books such as these men have left us, 
books such as both men and women are writing in 



A Certain Condescension 45 

America to-day! Is there finer workmanship in Ameri- 
can painting or American music or American architec- 
ture than can be found in American novels by the 
reader willing to search and discriminate? A con- 
temporary poet confessed that he would have rather 
written a certain sonnet (which accompanied the con- 
fession) than have built Brooklyn Bridge. One may 
doubt the special case, yet uphold the principle. Be- 
cause a novel is meant to give pleasure, because it deals 
with imagination rather than with facts and appeals to 
the generality rather than to the merely literary man 
or the specialist, because, in short, a novel is a novel, 
and a modern American novel, is no excuse for prig- 
gish reserves in our praise or blame. If there is any- 
thing worth criticizing in contemporary American 
literature it is our fiction. 

Absurd as it may seem in theory, we have patronized 
and do patronize our novels, even the best of them, 
following too surely, though with a bias of our own, 
the Anglo-Saxon prejudice traditional to the race. And 
if the curious frame of mind that many reserve for 
fiction be analyzed and blame distributed, there will 
be a multitude of readers, learned and unlearned, proud 
and humble, critical and uncritical, who must admit 
their share. Nevertheless, the righteous wrath inspired 
by the situation shall not draw us into that dangerous 
and humorless thing, a general indictment. There are 
readers aplenty who, to quote Painter once more, find 
their novels "pleasant to avoyde the griefe of a Win- 
ters night and length of Sommers day," and are duly 



46 On Fiction 

appreciative of that service. With such honest, if un- 
exacting, readers I have no quarrel; nor with many 
more critical who respect, while they criticize, the art 
of fiction. But with the scholars who slight fiction, the 
critics who play with it, the general reader who likes 
it contemptuously, and the social enthusiast who 
neglects its better for its worser part, the issue is direct. 
All are the victims of hereditary opinion; but some 
should know better than to be thus beguiled. 

The Brahman among American readers of fiction is 
of course the college professor of English. His atti- 
tude (I speak of the type; there are individual varia- 
tions of note) toward the novel is curious and interest- 
ing. It is exhibited perhaps in the title by which such 
courses in the novel as the college permits are usually 
listed. "Prose fiction" seems to be the favorite descrip- 
tion, a label designed to recall the existence of an un- 
deniably respectable fiction in verse that may justify 
a study of the baser prose. By such means is so dubi- 
ous a term as novel or short story kept out of the 
college catalogue! 

Yet even more curious is the academic attitude 
toward the novel itself. Whether the normal professor 
reads many or few is not the question, nor even how 
much he enjoys or dislikes them. It is what he permits 
himself to say that is significant. Behind every assent 
to excellence one feels a reservation: yes, it is good 
enough for a novel! Behind every criticism of un- 
truth, of bad workmanship, of mediocrity (alas! so 
often deserved in America!) is a sneering implication: 



A Certain Condescension 47 

but, after all, it is only a novel. Not thus does he 
treat the stodgy play in stodgier verse, the merits of 
which, after all, may amount to this, that in appear- 
ance it is literary; not thus the critical essay or in- 
vestigation that too often is like the parasite whose sus- 
taining life comes from the greater life on which it 
feeds. In the eyes of such a critic the author of an 
indifferent essay upon Poe has more distinguished him- 
self than if he had written a better than indifferent short 
story. Fiction, he feels, is the plaything of the popu- 
lace. The novel is "among the lower productions of 
our literature." It is plebeian, it is successful, it is 
multitudinous; the Greeks in their best period did not 
practise it (but here he may be wrong) ; any one can 
read it; let us keep it down, brethren, while we may. 
Many not professors so phrase their inmost thoughts 
of fiction and the novel. 

And in all this the college professor is profoundly 
justified by tradition, if not always by common sense. 
To him belongs that custody of the classical in litera- 
ture which his profession inherited from the monas- 
teries, and more remotely from the rhetoricians of 
Rome. And there is small place for fiction, and none 
at all for the novel and the short story as we know them, 
in what has been preserved of classic literature. The 
early Renaissance, with its Sidney for spokesman, at- 
tacked the rising Elizabethan drama because it was un- 
classical. The later Renaissance, by the pen of Addi- 
son (who would have made an admirable college pro- 
fessor), sneered at pure fiction, directly and by im- 



48 On Fiction 

plication, because it was unclassical. To-day we have 
lost our veneration for Latin and Greek as languages, 
we no longer deprecate an English work because it hap- 
pens to be in English; nevertheless the tradition still 
grips us, especially if we happen to be Brahmanic. 
Our college professors, and many less excusable, still 
doubt the artistic validity of work in a form never dig- 
nified by the practice of the ancients, never hallowed, 
like much of English literature besides, by a long line 
of native productions adapting classic forms to new 
ages and a new speech. The epic, the lyric, the pas- 
toral, the comedy, the tragedy, the elegy, the satire, 
the myth, even the fable, have been classic, have usually 
been literature. But the novel has never been a pre- 
serve for the learned, although it came perilously near 
to that fate in the days of Shakespeare; has ever been 
written for cash or for popular success rather than for 
scholarly reputation; has never been studied for gram- 
mar, for style, for its "beauties"; has since its genesis 
spawned into millions that no man can classify, and 
produced a hundred thousand pages of mediocrity for 
one masterpiece. All this (and in addition prejudices 
unexpressed and a residuum of hereditary bias) lies 
behind the failure of most professors of English to give 
the good modern novel its due. Their obstinacy is un- 
fortunate; for, if they praised at all, they would not, 
like many hurried reviewers, praise the worst best. 

I will not say that more harm has been done to the 
cause of the novel in America by feeble reviewing than 
by any other circumstance, for that would not be true; 



A Certain Condescension 49 

bad reading has been more responsible for the light 
estimation in which our novel is held. Nevertheless it 
is certain that the ill effects of a doubtful literary repu- 
tation are more sadly displayed in current criticism of 
the novel than elsewhere. An enormous effusion of 
writing about novels, especially in the daily papers, 
most of it casual and conventional, much of it with 
neither discrimination nor constraint, drowns the few 
manful voices raised to a pitch of honest concern. The 
criticism of fiction, taken by and large, is not so good 
as the criticism of our acted drama, not so good as our 
musical criticism, not so good as current reviewing of 
poetry and of published plays. 

Are reviewers bewildered by the coveys of novels 
that wing into editorial offices by every mail? Is the 
reviewing of novels left to the novice as a mere rhetori- 
cal exercise in which, a subject being afforded, he can 
practise the display of words? Or is it because a novel 
is only a novel, only so many, many novels, for which 
the same hurried criticism must do, whether they be 
bad or mediocre or best? The reviewing page of the 
standard newspaper fills me with unutterable depres- 
sion. There seem to be so many stories about which 
the same things can be said. There seems to be so 
much fiction that is "workmanlike," that is "fascinat- 
ing," that "nobly grasps contemporary America," that 
will "become a part of permanent literature," that 
"lays bare the burning heart of the race." Of course 
the need of the journalist to make everything "strong" 
is behind much of this mockery; but not all. Heredi- 



50 On Fiction 

tary disrespect for fiction has more to do with this flood 
of bad criticism than appears at first sight. 

Far more depressing, however, is the rarity of real 
criticism of the novel anywhere. As Henry James, one 
of the few great critics who have been willing to take 
the novel seriously, remarked in a now famous essay, 
the most notable thing about the modern novel in Eng- 
lish is its appearance of never having been criticized 
at all. A paragraph or so under "novels of the day" is 
all the novelist may expect until he is famous, and more 
in quantity, but not much more in quality, then. As 
for critical essays devoted to his work, discriminating 
studies that pick out the few good books from the many 
bad, how few they are (and how welcome, now that they 
are increasing in number), how deplorably few in com- 
parison with the quantity of novels, in comparison with 
the quality of the best novels! 

And what of the general public, that last arbiter in 
a democracy, whose referendum, for a year at least, 
confirms or renders null and void all critical legislation 
good or bad? The general public is apparently on the 
side of the novelist; to borrow a slang term expressive 
here, it is "crazy" about fiction. It reads so much fic- 
tion that hundreds of magazines and dozens of pub- 
lishers live by nothing else. It reads so much fiction 
that public libraries have to bait their serious books 
with novels in order to get them read. It is so avid for 
fiction that the trades whose business it is to cultivate 
public favor, journalism and advertising, use almost 
as much fiction as the novel itself. A news article or 



A Certain Condescension 51 

an interview or a Sunday write-up nowadays has char- 
acter, background, and a plot precisely like a short 
story. Its climax is carefully prepared for in the best 
manner of Edgar Allan Poe, and truth is rigorously 
subordinated (I do not say eliminated) in the interest 
of a vivid impression. Advertising has become half 
narrative and half familiar dialogue. Household goods 
are sold by anecdotes, ready-made clothes figure in epi- 
sodes illustrated by short-story artists, and novelettes, 
distributed free, conduct us through an interesting fic- 
tion to the grand climax, where all plot complexities 
are untangled by the installation of an automatic water- 
heater. I am not criticizing the tendency — it has made 
the pursuit of material comfort easier and more inter- 
esting, — but what a light it throws upon our mania for 
reading stories! 

Alas! the novel needs protection from its friends. 
This vast appetite for fiction is highly uncritical. It 
will swallow anything that interests, regardless of the 
make-up of the dish. Only the inexperienced think 
that it is easy to write an interesting story; but it is 
evident that if a writer can be interesting he may lack 
every other virtue and yet succeed. He can be a bad 
workman, he can be untrue, he can be sentimental, he 
can be salacious, and yet succeed. 

No one need excite himself over this circumstance. 
It is inevitable in a day when whole classes that never 
read before begin to read. The danger lies in the atti- 
tude of these new readers, and many old ones, toward 
their fiction. For they, too, condescend even when 



52 On Fiction 

most hungry for stories. They, too, share the inherited 
opinion that a novel is only a novel, after all, to be 
read, but not to be respected, to be squeezed for its 
juices, then dropped like a grape-skin and forgotten. 
Perhaps the Elizabethan mob felt much the same way 
about the plays they crowded to see; but their respect, 
the critics' respect, Shakespeare's respect, for the lan- 
guage of noble poesy, for noble words and deeds en- 
shrined in poetry, is not paralleled to-day by an ap- 
preciation of the fine art of imaginative character rep- 
resentation as it appears in our novel and in all good 
fiction. 

Is it necessary to prove this public disrespect? The 
terms in which novels are described by their sponsors 
is proof enough in itself. Seemingly, everything that is 
reputable must be claimed for every novel — good 
workmanship, vitality, moral excellence, relative su- 
periority, absolute greatness— in order to secure for it 
any deference whatsoever. Or, from another angle, 
how many readers buy novels, and buy them to keep? 
How many modern novels does one find well bound, 
and placed on the shelves devoted to "standard read- 
ing"? In these Olympian fields a mediocre biography, 
a volume of second-rate poems, a rehash of history, 
will find their way before the novels that in the last 
decade have equaled, if not outranked, the rest of our 
creative literature. 

If more proof were needed, the curious predilections 
of the serious-minded among our novel-readers would 
supply it. For not all Americans take the novel too 



A Certain Condescension 53 

lightly; some take it as heavily as death. To the school 
that tosses off and away the latest comer is opposed 
the school which, despising all frivolous stories written 
for pleasure merely, speaks in tense, devoted breath 
of those narratives wherein fiction is weighted with 
facts, and pinned by a moral to the sober side of life. 
It is significant that the novels most highly respected 
in America are studies of social conditions, reflexes of 
politics, or tales where the criticism of morals over- 
shadows the narrative. Here the novel is an admirable 
agent. Its use as a purveyor of miscellaneous ideas 
upon things in general is no more objectionable than 
the cutting of young spruces to serve as Christmas- 
trees. For such a function they were not created, but 
they make a good end, nevertheless. The important 
inference is rather that American readers who do pre- 
tend to take the novel seriously are moved not so much 
by the fiction in their narratives as by the sociology, 
philosophy, or politics imaginatively portrayed. They 
respect a story with such a content because it comes 
as near as the novel can to not being fiction at all. And 
this, I imagine, is an unconscious throw-back to the 
old days when serious-minded readers chose Hannah 
More for the place of honor, because her stories taught 
the moralist how to live and die. 

The historically minded will probably remark upon 
these general conclusions that a certain condescension 
toward some form of literature has ever been predict- 
able of the general reader; the practically minded may 
add that no lasting harm to the mind of man and the 



54 On Fiction 

pursuit of happiness seems to have come of it. The 
first I freely admit; the second I gravely doubt for the 
present and distrust for the future. Under conditions 
as we have them and will increasingly have them here 
in America, under democratic conditions, condescen- 
sion toward fiction, the most democratic of literary arts, 
is certainly dangerous. It is dangerous because it dis- 
courages good writing. In this reading society that 
we have made for ourselves here and in western Eu- 
rope, where much inspiration, more knowledge, and a 
fair share of the joy of living come from the printed 
page, good writing is clearly more valuable than ever 
before in the history of the race. I do not agree with 
the pessimists who think that a democratic civiliza- 
tion is necessarily an enemy to fine writing for the 
public. Such critics underrate the challenge which 
these millions of minds to be reached and souls to be 
touched must possess for the courageous author; they 
forget that writers, Hke actors, are inspired by a 
crowded house. But the thought and the labor and 
the pain that lie behind good writing are doubly diffi- 
cult in an atmosphere of easy tolerance and good- 
natured condescension on the part of the readers of the 
completed work. 

The novel is the test case for democratic literature. 
We cannot afford to pay its practitioners with cash 
merely, for cash discriminates in quantity and little 
more. Saul and David were judged by the numbers of 
their thousands slain; but the test was a crude one for 
them and cruder still for fiction. We cannot afford to 



A Certain Condescension 55 

patronize these novelists as our ancestors did before 
us. Not prizes or endowments or coterie worship or, 
certainly, more advertising is what the American 
novelist requires, but a greater respect for his craft. 
The Elizabethan playwright was frequently despised 
of the learned world, and, if a favorite with the vulgar, 
not always a respected one. Strange that learned and 
vulgar alike should repeat the fallacy in dispraising the 
preeminently popular art of our own times! To Sir 
Francis Bacon "Hamlet'^ was presumably only a play- 
actor's play. If the great American story should ar- 
rive at last, would we not call it "only a novel"? 



The Essence of Popularity 

You might suppose that popular literature was a mod- 
ern invention. Cultivated shoulders shrug at the men- 
tion of "best sellers" with that air of "the world is 
going to the devil" which just now is annoyingly 
familiar. Serious minded people write of The Satur- 
day Evening Post as if it represented some new fanati- 
cism destined to wreck civilization. The excessive 
popularity of so many modern novels is felt to be a 
mystery. 

Of course there are new elements in literary popu- 
larity. The wave of interest used to move more slowly. 
Now thousands, and sometimes millions, read the popu- 
lar story almost simultaneously, and see it, just a little 
later on the films. Millions, also, of the class which 
never used to read at all are accessible to print and 
have the moving pictures to help them. 

But popularity has not changed its fundamental 
characteristics. The sweep of one man's idea or fancy 
through other minds, kindling them to interest, has 
been typical since communication began. The Greek 
romances of Heliodorus may be analyzed for their 
popular elements quite as readily as "If Winter 
Comes." "Pilgrim's Progress" and "The Thousand 
and One Nights" could serve as models for success, and 
the question, What makes popularity in fiction? be 

56 



Essence of Popularity 57 

answered from them with dose, if not complete, refer- 
ence to the present. However, the results of an inquiry 
into popularity will be surer if we stick to modern liter- 
ature, not forgetting its historical background. Human 
nature, which changes its essence so slowly through the 
centuries, nevertheless shows rapid alterations of phase. 
The question I propose, therefore, is. What makes a 
novel popular in our time? 

I do not ask it for sordid reasons. What makes a 
novel sell 100,000 copies, or a short story bring $1000? 
may seem the same query; but it does not get the 
same answer, or, apparently, any answer valuable for 
criticism. A cloud descends upon the eyes of those 
who try to teach how to make money out of literature 
and blinds them. Their books go wrong from the 
start, and most of them are nearly worthless. They 
propose to teach the sources of popularity, yet instead 
of dealing with those fundamental qualities of emo- 
tion and idea which (as I hope to show) make popu- 
larity, their tale is all of emphasis, suspense, begin- 
nings and endings, the relativity of characters, dia- 
logue, setting — useful points for the artisan but not 
the secret of popularity, nor, it may be added, of great- 
ness in literature. Technique is well enough, in fact 
some technique is indispensable for a book that is to 
be popular, but it is the workaday factor in literature, 
of itself it accomplishes nothing. 

But technique can be taught. That is the explana- 
tion of the hundred books upon it, and their justifica- 
tion. You cannot teach observation, or sympathy, or 



58 On Fiction 

the background of knowledge which makes possible the 
interpretation and selection of experience — not at least 
in a lesson a week for nine months. Hence literary 
advisers who must teach something and teach it quickly 
are drawn, sometimes against their better judgment, 
to write books on technique by which criticism profits 
little. Technical perfection becomes their equivalent 
for excellence and for popularity. It is not an equiva- 
lent. More than a mason is required for the making 
of a statue. 

I disclaim any attempt to teach how to be popular 
in this essay, although deductions may be made. I am 
interested in popularity as a problem for criticism. I 
am interested in appraising the pleasure to be got from 
such popular novels as "The Age of Innocence," "Miss 
Lulu Bett," "If Winter Comes," or "The Turmoil"— 
and the not infrequent disappointments from others 
equally popular. I am especially interested in the at- 
tempt to estimate real excellence, an attempt which re- 
quires that the momentarily popular shall be separated 
from the permanently good; which requires that a dis- 
tinction be made between what must have some excel- 
lence because so many people like it, and what is good 
in a book whether many people like it or not. Such 
discrimination may not help the young novelist to 
make money, but it can refine judgment and deepen ap- 
preciation. 

As for the popularity and its meaning, there need 
be no quarrel over that term. Let us rule out such ac- 
cidents as when a weak book becomes widely known 



Essence of Popularity 59 

because it is supposed to be indecent, or because it is 
the first to embody popular propaganda, or because its 
hero is identified with an important figure of real life, 
or for any other casual reason. If a novel, because of 
the intrinsic interest of its story, or on account of the 
contagion of the idea it contains, is widely read by 
many kinds of readers, and if these readers on their 
own initiative recommend the book they have read to 
others, that is popularity, and a sufficient definition. 

Perfection of form is not enough to make a book 
popular. A story has to move or few will read it, but 
it is doubtful whether a greater technical achievement 
than this is required for popularity. "Samson Agon- 
istes'' is technically perfect, but was never popular, 
while, to pass from the sublime to its opposite, "This 
Side of Paradise'^ was most crudely put together, and 
yet was popular. The best-built short stories of the 
past decade have not been the most popular, have not 
even been the best. No popular writer but could have 
Seen (so I profoundly believe) more popular if he had 
written better. But good writing is not a specific for 
unpopularity. The excellent writing of Howells could 
not give him Mark Twain's audience. The weak and 
tedious construction of Shakespeare's "Antony and 
Cleopatra," the flat style of Harold Bell Wright's nar- 
ratives, has not prevented them from being liked. 
Form is only a first step toward popularity. 

Far more important is an appeal to the emotions, 
which good technique can only make more strong. But 
what is an appeal to the emotions? "Uncle Tom's 



6o On Fiction 

Cabin" appealed to the emotions, and so does "Get- 
Rich-Quick Walling ford." To what emotions does the 
popular book appeal? What makes "Treasure Island" 
popular? Why did "Main Street" have such an unex- 
pected and still reverberating success? 

"Treasure Island" is popular because it stirs and 
satisfies two instinctive cravings of mankind, the love 
of romantic adventure, and the desire for sudden 
wealth. This is not true, or rather it is not the whole, 
or even the important, truth, in "Main Street." There 
the chief appeal is to an idea not an instinct. We left 
the war nationally self-conscious as perhaps never be- 
fore, acutely conscious of the contrasts between our 
habits, our thinking, our pleasures, our beliefs, and 
those of Europe. When the soldiers oversea talked 
generalities at all it was usually of such topics. The 
millions that never went abroad were plucked from 
their Main Streets, and herded through great cities 
to the mingled companionship of the camps. "Main 
Street," when it came to be written, found an awak- 
ened consciousness of provincialism, and a detached 
view of the home town such as had never before been 
shared by many. Seeing home from without was so 
general as to constitute, not a mere experience, but a 
mass emotion. And upon this new conception, this 
prejudice against every man's Main Street, the book 
grasped, and thrived. In like manner, "Uncle Tom's 
Cabin" grew great upon its conception of slavery. 
"Robert Elsmere" swept the country because of its ex- 
ploitation of freedom in religious thought. No one of 



Essence of Popularity 6i 

these books could have been written, or would have 
been popular if they had been written, before their pre- 
cise era; no one is likely long to survive it, except as a 
social document which scholars will read and historians 
quote. 

Roughly then, the appeal which makes for popu- 
larity is either to the instinctive emotions permanent 
in all humanity, though changing shape with circum- 
stances, or to the fixed ideas of the period, which may 
often and justly be called prejudice. A book may gain 
its popularity either way, but the results of the first are 
more likely to be enduring. "Paradise Lost," the least 
popular of popular poems, still stirs the instinctive 
craving for heroic revolt, and lives for that quite as 
much as for the splendors of its verse. Dryden's "Hind 
and the Panther," which exploited the prejudices of its 
times, and was popular then, is almost dead. 

What are these instinctive cravings that seek satis- 
faction in fiction and, finding it, make both great and 
little books popular? Let me list a few without at- 
tempting to be complete. 

First in importance probably is the desire to escape 
from reality into a more interesting life. This is a 
foundation, of course, of all romantic stories, and is 
part of the definition of the romantic, but it applies to 
much in literature that is not usually regarded as 
romance. A more interesting life than yours or mine 
does not mean one we should wish actually to live, 
otherwise it would be difficult to account for the taste 
for detective stories of many sedentary bank presi- 



62 On Fiction 

dents; nor does it mean necessarily a beautiful, a wild, 
a romantic life. No, we wish to escape to any imagined 
life that will satisfy desires suppressed by circum- 
stance, or incapable of development in any attainable 
reality. 

This desire to escape is eternal, the variety differs 
with the individual and still more with the period. 
While youthful love, or romantic adventure as in 
"Treasure Island," has been an acceptable mode for 
literature at least as far back as the papyrus tales of 
the Egyptians, more precise means of delivery from the 
intolerable weight of real life appear and disappear in 
popular books. In the early eighteen hundreds, men 
and women longed to be blighted in love, to be in lonely 
revolt against the prosaic well-being of a world of little 
men. Byron was popular. In the Augustan age of 
England, classic antiquity was a refuge for the dream- 
ing spirit; in Shakespeare's day, Italy; in the fifteenth 
century, Arthurian romance. Just at present, and in 
America, the popularity of a series of novels like "The 
Beautiful and Damned," "The Wasted Generation," 
"Erik Dorn," and "Cytherea," seems to indicate that 
many middle-aged readers wish to experience vicari- 
ously the alcoholic irresponsibility of a society of "flap- 
pers," young graduates, and country club rakes, who 
threw the pilot overboard as soon as they left the war 
zone and have been cruising wildly ever since. We re- 
member that' for a brief period in the England of 
Charles II, James II, and William and Mary, rakish- 
ness in the plays of Wycherley and Congreve had a 



Essence of Popularity 63 

glamour of romance upon it and was popular. Indeed, 
the novel or drama that gives to a generation the escape 
it desires will always be popular. Test Harold Bell 
Wright or Zane Grey, Rudyard Kipling or Walter 
Scott, by this maxim, and it will further define itself, 
and ring true. 

Another human craving is the desire to satisfy the 
impulses of sex. This is much more difficult to define 
than the first because it spreads in one phase or an- 
other through all cravings. Romance of course has its 
large sex element, and so have the other attributes to 
be spoken of later. However, there is a direct and 
concentrated interest in the relations between the sexes 
which, in its finer manifestations, seeks for a vivid con- 
trast of personalities in love; in its cruder forms de- 
sires raw passion; in its pathological state craves the 
indecent. A thousand popular novels illustrate the 
first phase; many more, of which the cave-man story, 
the desert island romance, "The Sheik" and its com- 
panions are examples, represent the second; the ever- 
surging undercurrent of pornography springs to satisfy 
the third. 

Many sex stories are popular simply because they 
satisfy curiosity, but curiosity in a broader sense is a 
human craving which deserves a separate category. 
Popular novels seldom depend upon it entirely, but 
they profit by it, sometimes hugely. A novel like Dos 
Passos's 'Three Soldiers," or Mrs. Wharton's "Age of 
Innocence," or Mrs. Atherton's "Sleeping Fires," makes 
its first, though not usually its strongest, appeal to our 



64 On Fiction 

curiosity as to how others live or were living. This was 
the strength of the innumerable New England, Creole, 
mountaineer, Pennsylvania Dutch stories in the flour- 
ishing days of local color. It is a prop of the historical 
novel and a strong right arm for the picture melodrama 
of the underworld or the West. Indeed, the pictures, 
by supplying a photographic background of real scenes 
inaccessible to the audience have gained a point upon 
the written story. 

Curiosity is a changeable factor, a sure play for im- 
mediate popularity, but not to be depended upon for 
long life. It waxes and wanes and changes its object. 
Just now we are curious about Russia, the South Sea 
Islanders, and night life on Broadway; to-morrow it 
may be New Zealand and Australia, the Argentine 
millionaire, and quite certainly the Chinese and China. 
Books appealing to the craving for escape have a longer 
life, for a story that takes a generation out of itself 
into fairyland keeps some of its power for the next. 
Nevertheless, the writer who guesses v/here curious 
minds are reaching and gives them what they want, 
puts money in his purse. 

A fourth craving, which is as general as fingers and 
toes, is for revenge. We laugh now at the plays of re- 
venge before '^Hamlet," where the stage ran blood, and 
even the movie audience no longer enjoys a story the 
single motive of which is physical revenge. Blood for 
blood means to us either crime or rowdyism. And yet 
revenge is just as popular in literature now as in the 
sixteenth century. Only its aspect has changed. Our 



Essence of Popularity 65 

fathers are not butchered in feuds, our sons are not sold 
into slavery, and except in war or in street robberies 
we are not insulted by brute physical force. Never- 
theless .we are cheated by scoundrels, oppressed by 
financial tyranny, wounded by injustice, suppressed by 
self-sufficiency, rasped by harsh tempers, annoyed by 
snobbery, and often ruined by unconscious selfishness. 
We long to strike back at the human traits which have 
wronged us, and the satiric depiction of hateful charac- 
ters whose seeming virtues are turned upside down to 
expose their impossible hearts feeds our craving for 
vicarious revenge. We dote upon vinegarish old maids, 
self-righteous men, and canting women when they are 
exposed by narrative art, and especially when poetic 
justice wrecks them. The books that contain them bid 
for popularity. It happens that in rapid succession we 
have seen three novels in which this element of popular 
success v/as strong: Miss Sinclair's "Mr. Waddington 
of Wyck," "Vera," by the author of "Elizabeth in Her 
German Garden," and Mr. Hutchinson's "If Winter 
Comes." The first two books focus upon this quality, 
and their admirable unity gives them superior force; 
but it is noteworthy that "If Winter Comes," which 
adds other popular elements in large measure to its re- 
lease of hate, has been financially the most successful 
of the three. 

To these deep cravings of the heart must be added 
another of major importance. I mean aspiration, the 
deep desire of all human without exception sometimes 
to be better, nobler, finer, truer. Stories of daring in 



66 On Fiction 

the face of unconquerable odds, stories of devotion, 
above all stories of self-sacrifice are made to gratify 
this emotion. They are purges for the restless soul. 
Some critic of our short story discovered not long ago 
that the bulk of the narratives chosen for reprinting 
had self-sacrifice as theme. This is precisely what one 
would expect of comfortable, ease-loving peoples, like 
the Germans before the empire and the Americans of 
our generation. When no real sacrifice of goods, of 
energy, of love, or of life is necessary, then the crav- 
ing for stories of men who give up all and women who 
efface themselves is particularly active. The hard, in- 
dividualistic stories of selfish characters — Ben Hecht's 
for example, and Scott Fitzgerald's — ^have been written 
after a war period of enforced self-sacrifice and by 
young men who were familiar with suffering for a cause. 
But most American readers of our generation live easily 
and have always lived easily, and that undoubtedly ac- 
counts for the extraordinary popularity here of aspir- 
ing books. Reading of a fictitious hero who suffers for 
others is a tonic for our conscience, and like massage 
takes the place of exercise. By a twist in the same 
argument, it may be seen that the cheerful optimist in 
fiction, who Pollyannawise believes all is for the best, 
satisfies the craving to justify our well-being. I do not, 
however, mean to disparage this element of popularity. 
It is after all the essential quality of tragedy where 
the soul rises above misfortune. It is a factor in noble 
literature as v/ell as in popular success. 

So much for some of the typical and instinctive crav- 



Essence of Popularity 67 

ings which cry for satisfaction and are the causes of 
popularity. To them may be added others of course, 
notably the desire for sudden wealth, which is a factor 
in ^'Treasure Island" as in all treasure stories, and the 
prime cause of success in the most popular of all plots, 
the tale of Cinderella, which, after passing through 
feudal societies with a prince's hand as reward, changed 
its sloven sister for a shopgirl and King Cophetua into 
a millionaire, and swept the x\merican stage. To this 
may also be added simpler stimulants of instinctive 
emotion, humor stirring to pleasant laughter, pathos 
that exercises sympathy, the happy ending that makes 
for joy. Stories which succeed because they stir and 
satisfy in this fashion are like opera in a foreign tongue, 
which moves us even when we do not fully understand 
the reason for our emotion. They differ from another 
kind of popular story, in which a popular idea rather 
than an instinctive emotion is crystallized, and which 
now must be considered. 

Each generation has its fixed ideas. A few are in- 
herited intact by the generation that follows, a few are 
passed on with slight transformation, but most crumble 
or change into different versions of the old half-truths. 
Among the most enduring of prejudices is the fallacy 
of the good old times. Upon that formula nine-tenths 
of the successful historical romances are built. That 
American wives suffer from foreign husbands, that 
capital is ruthless, that youth is right and age wrong, 
that energy wins over intellect, that virtue is always 
rewarded, are American conceptions of some endurance 



68 On Fiction 

that have given short but lofty flights to thousands of 
native stories. 

More important, however, in the history of fiction are 
those wide and slow moving currents of opinion, for 
which prejudice is perhaps too narrow a name, which 
flow so imperceptibly through the minds of a genera- 
tion or a whole century that there is little realization 
of their novelty. Such a slow-moving current was the 
humanitarianism which found such vigorous expression 
in Dickens, the belief in industrial democracy which is 
being picked up as a theme by novelist after novelist 
to-day, or the sense of the value of personality and hu- 
man experience which so intensely characterizes the 
literature of the early Renaissance. 

If a novel draws up into itself one of these ideas, 
filling it with emotion, it gains perhaps its greatest as- 
surance of immediate popularity. If the idea is of 
vast social importance, this popularity may continue. 
But if it is born of immediate circumstance, like the 
hatred of slavery in "Uncle Tom's Cabin," or if it is 
still more transient, say, the novelty of a new invention, 
like the airplane or wireless, then the book grows stale 
with its theme. The like is true of a story that teaches 
a lesson a generation are willing to be taught — it lives 
as long as the lesson. What has become of Charles 
Kingsley's novels, of the apologues of Maria Edgeworth? 
"Main Street" is such a story; so was "Mr. Britling 
Sees It Through"; so probably "A Doll's House." De- 
cay is already at their hearts. Only the student knows 
how many like tales that preached fierily a text for the 



Essence of Popularity 69 

times have died in the past. But I am writing of popu- 
larity not of permanence. In four popular novels out 
of five, even in those where the appeal to the instinctive 
emotions is dominant, suspect some prejudice of the 
times embodied and usually exploited. It is the most 
potent of lures for that ever increasing public which 
has partly trained intelligence as well as emotions. 

Perhaps it is already clear that most popular novels 
combine many elements of popularity, although usually 
one is dominant. Among the stories, for instance, which 
I have mentioned most frequently, "Main Street" de- 
pends upon a popular idea, but makes use also of the 
revenge motive. It is not at all, as many hasty critics 
said, an appeal to curiosity. We know our Main Streets 
well enough already. And therefore in England, which 
also was not curious about Main Streets, and where 
the popular idea that Sinclair Lewis seized upon was 
not prevalent, the book has had only a moderate suc- 
cess. "If Winter Comes" combines the revenge motive 
with aspiration. Scott Fitzgerald's first novel made its 
strong appeal to curiosity. We had heard of the wild 
younger generation and were curious. His second book 
depends largely upon the craving for sex experience, 
in which it resembles Mr. Hergesheimer's "Cytherea," 
but also plays heavily upon the motive of escape, and 
upon sheer curiosity. "Miss Lulu Bett" was a story 
of revenge. Booth Tarkington's "Alice Adams" — to 
bring in a new title — is a good illustration of a story 
where for once a popular novelist slurred over the popu- 
lar elements in order to concentrate upon a study of 



70 On Fiction < 

character. His book received tardy recognition but it 
disappointed his less critical admirers. Mr. White's 
^'Andivius Hedulio" depends for its popularity upon 
curiosity and escape. 

The popular story, then, the financially successful, 
the immediately notorious story, should appeal to the 
instinctive emotions and may be built upon popular 
prejudice. What is the moral for the writer? Is he 
to lay out the possible fields of emotion as a surveyor 
prepares for his blue print? By no means. Unless he 
follows his own instinct in the plan, or narrates because 
of his own excited thinking he will produce a thinly 
clad formula rather than a successful story. There is 
no moral for the writer, only some rays of light thrown 
upon the nature of his achievement. The way to ac- 
complish popularity, if that is what you want, is to 
write for the people, and let formula, once it is under- 
stood, take care of itself. As an editor, wise in popu- 
y'' larity, once said to me, "Oppenheim and the rest are 
popular because they think like the people not for 
them." 

What is the moral of this discussion for the critical 
reader? A great one, for if he does not wish to be 
tricked constantly by his own emotions into supposing 
that what is timely is therefore fine, and what moves 
him is therefore great, he must distinguish between the 
elements of popularity and the essence of greatness. It 
is evident, I think, from the argument that every ele- 
ment of popularity described above may be made ef- 
fective upon our weak human nature with only an ap- 



Essence of Popularity 71 

proximation to truth. The craving for escape may- 
be, and usually h, answered by sentimental romance, 
where every emotion, from patriotism to amorousness, 
is mawkish and unreal. Every craving may be played 
upon in the same fashion just because it is a craving, 
and the result be often more popular for the exaggera- 
tion. Also it is notorious that a prejudice — or a pop- 
ular idea, if you prefer the term — which is seized upon 
for fiction, almost inevitably is strained beyond logic 
and beyond truth, so much so that in rapid years, like 
those of 191 6 to 1920 which swept us into propaganda 
and out again, the emphatic falsity of a book's central 
thesis may be recognized before the first editions are 
exhausted. It would be interesting to run off, in the 
midst of a 1922 performance, some of the war films 
that stirred audiences of 1918. It will be interesting 
to reread some of the cheaper and more popular war 
stories that carried even you, O judicious reader, off 
your even balance not five years ago to-day! 

We have always known, of course, that a novel can 
be highly popular without being truly excellent. 
Nevertheless, it is a valuable discipline to specify the 
reasons. And it is good discipline also in estimating 
the intrinsic value of a novel to eliminate as far as is 
possible the temporal and the accidental; and in par- 
ticular the especial appeal it may have to your own 
private craving — for each of us has his soft spot where 
the pen can pierce. On the contrary, if the highly 
speculative business of guessing the probable circula- 
tion of a novel ever becomes yours, then you must 



72 On Fiction 

doubly emphasize the importance of these very quali- 
ties; search for them, analyze them out of the narra- 
tive, equate them with the tendencies of the times, the 
new emotions stirring, the new interests, new thoughts 
abroad, and then pick best sellers in advance. 

Yet in eliminating the accidental in the search for 
real excellence, it would be disastrous to eliminate all 
causes of popularity with it. That would be to assume 
that the good story cannot be popular, which is non- 
sense. The best books are nearly always popular, 
if not in a year, certainly in a decade or a century. 
Often they spread more slowly than less solid achieve- 
ments for the same reason that dear things sell less 
rapidly than cheap. The best books cost more to 
read because they contain more, and to get much out 
the reader must always put much in. Nevertheless, the 
good novel will always contain one or more of the 
elements of popularity in great intensity. I make but 
one exception, and that for those creations of the sheer 
intellect, like the delicate analyses of Henry James, 
where the appeal is to the subtle mind, and the emotion 
aroused an intellectual emotion. Such novels are on 
the heights, but they are never at the summit of literary 
art. They are limited by the partiality of their appeal, 
just as they are exalted by the perfection of their ac- 
complishment. They cannot be popular, and are not. 

The "best seller" therefore may be great but does 
not need to be. It is usually a weak book, no matter 
how readable, because ordinarily it has only the ele- 
ments of popularity to go on, and succeeds by their 



Essence of Popularity 73 

number and timeliness instead of by fineness and truth. 
A second-rate man can compound a best seller if his 
sense for the popular is first-rate. In his books the 
instinctive emotions are excited over a broad area, and 
arise rapidly to sink again. No better examples can 
be found than in the sword-and-buckler romance of 
our 'nineties which set us all for a while thinking 
feudal thoughts and talking shallow gallantry. Now 
it is dead, stone dead. Not even the movies can re- 
vive it. The emotions it aroused went flat over night. 
Much the same is true of books that trade in prejudice, 
like the white slave stories of a decade ago. For a 
moment we were stirred to the depths. We swallowed 
the concept whole and raged with a furious indigestion 
of horrible fact. And then it proved to be colic only. 
With such a hght ballast of prejudice or sentiment 
can the profitable ship popularity be kept upright for 
a little voyage, and this, prevailingly, is all her cargo. 
But the wise writer, if he is able, as Scott, and Dickens, 
and Clemens were able, freights her more deeply. As 
for the good reader, he will go below to investigate 
before the voyage commences; or, if in midcourse he 
likes not his carrier, take off in his mental airplane 
and seek another book. 



II 

On the American Tradition 



The American Tradition 

I REMEMBER a talk in Dublin with an Irish writer 
whose English prose has adorned our period. It was 
191 8, and the eve of forced conscription, and his 
indignation with English policy was intense. "I will 
give up their language," he said, "all except Shake- 
speare. I will write only Gaelic." Unfortunately, he 
could read Gaelic much better than he could write it. 
In his heart, indeed, he knew how mad he would have 
been to give up the only literary tradition which, thanks 
to language, could be his own; and in a calmer mood 
since he has enriched that tradition with admirable 
translations from the Irish. He was suffering from 
a mild case of Anglomania. 

Who is the real Anglomaniac in America? Not the 
now sufficiently discredited individual with a monocle 
and a pseudo-Oxford accent, who tries to be more 
EngHsh than the English. Not the more subtly dan- 
gerous American who refers his tastes, his enthusiasms, 
his culture, and the prestige of his compatriots to an 
English test before he dare assert them. The real 
Anglomaniac is the American who tries to be less Eng- 
lish than his own American tradition. He is the man 
who is obsessed with the fear of "Anglo-Saxon domi- 
nation." 

How many; Anglomaniacs by this definition are at 

n 



78 On the American Tradition 

large in America each reader may judge for himself. 
Personally, I find them extraordinarily numerous, and 
of so many varieties, from the mere borrower of opin- 
ions to the deeply convinced zealot, that it seems wiser 
to analyze Anglomania than to discuss the various 
types that possess it. And in this analysis let us 
exclude from the beginning such very real, but tem- 
porary, grievances against the English as spring from 
Irish oppressions, trade rivalries, or the provocations 
which always arise between allies in war. All such 
causes of anti-English and an ti-^ 'Anglo-Saxon" senti- 
ment belong in a different category from the underlying 
motives which I propose to discuss. 

These new Anglomaniacs, with their talk of Anglo- 
Saxon domination, cannot mean English domination. 
That would be absurd, although even absurdities are 
current coin in restless years like these. At least one 
Irishman of my acquaintance knows that King George 
cabled Wilson to bring America into the war, and that 
until that cable came Wilson dared not act. I can 
conceive of an English influence upon literature that 
is worth attacking, and also worth defending. I can 
conceive of a far less important English influence upon 
our social customs. But in neither case, domination. 
That England dominates our finance, our industry, our 
politics, is just now, especially, the suspicion of a para- 
noiac, or the idea of an ignoramus. 

"Anglo-Saxon domination," even in an anti-British 
meeting, cannot and does not mean English domina- 
tion; it can mean only control of America by the so- 



The American Tradition 79 

called Anglo-Saxon element in our population. The 
quarrel is local, not international. The "Anglo-Saxon" 
three thousand miles away who cannot hit back is a 
scapegoat, a whipping boy for the so-called "Anglo- 
Saxon" American at home. 

What is an "Anglo-Saxon" American? Presumably 
he is the person familiar in "want" advertisements: 
"American family wants boarder for the summer. Ref- 
erences exchanged." But this does not help us much. 
He is certainly not English. Nothing is better estab- 
lished than the admixture of bloods since the earliest 
days of our nationality. That I, myself, for example, 
have ancestral portions of French, German, Welsh, and 
Scotch, as well as English blood in my veins, makes 
me, by any historical test, characteristically more 
rather than less American. Race, indeed, within very 
broad limits, is utterly different from nationality, and 
it is usually many, many centuries before the two 
become even approximately identical. The culture I 
have inherited, the political ideals I live by, the litera- 
ture which is my own, most of all the language that I 
speak, are far more important than the ultimate race 
or races I stem from, obviously more important, since 
in thousands of good Americans it is impossible to 
determine what races have gone to their making. There 
is no such thing as an Anglo-Saxon American — and so 
few English Americans that they are nationally insig- 
nificant. 

An American with a strong national individuality 
there certainly is, and it is true that his traditions, 



8o On the American TradiUon 

irrespective of the race of his forbears, are mainly 
English; from England he drew his political and social 
habits, his moral ideas, his literature, and his language. 
This does not make him a '^slave to England," as our 
most recent propagandists would have it; it does not 
put him in England's debt. We owe no debt to Eng- 
land. Great Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, 
South Africa, and ourselves are deeply in debt to our 
intellectual, our spiritual, our esthetic ancestors who 
were the molders of English history and English 
thought, the interpreters of English emotion, the mas- 
ters of the developing English mores that became our 
mores, and have since continued evolution with a dif- 
ference. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Spenser, and Milton, 
Wy cliff e, Bunyan, Fox, and Wesley, Elizabeth, Crom- 
well, and the great Whigs, these made the only tra- 
dition that can be called Anglo-Saxon, and if we have 
an American tradition, as we assuredly have, here are 
its roots. This is our "Anglo-Saxon domination." 

But if the roots of this tradition are English, its 
trunk is thoroughly American, seasoned and developed 
through two centuries of specifically American history. 
As we know it to-day it is no longer "Anglo-Saxon," 
it is as American as our cities, our soil, our accent 
upon English. If we are going to discuss "domination" 
let us he accurate and speak of the domination of 
American tradition. It is against the American tradi- 
tion that the new Anglomaniac actually protests. 

Dominating this American tradition is, dominating, 
almost tyrannical, for one reason only, but that a 



The American Tradition 8i 

strong one, a fact not a convention, a factor, not a 
mere influence — dominating because of the English 
language. 

In our century language has become once again as 
powerful as in the Roman Empire — and its effects, 
thanks to printing and easy transportation, are far 
more quickly attained. Hordes from all over Europe 
have swarmed into the domain of English. They have 
come to a country where the new language was in- 
dispensable. They have learned it, or their children 
have learned it. English has become their means of 
communication with their neighbors, with business, with 
the state. Sooner or later even the news of Europe 
has come to them through English, and sometimes 
unwillingly, but more often unconsciously, they have 
come under the American, the real "Anglo-Saxon" 
domination. 

For a language, of course, is more than words. It 
is a body of literature, it is a method of thinking, it 
is a definition of emotions, it is the exponent and the 
symbol of a civilization. You cannot adopt English 
without adapting yourself in some measure to the Eng- 
lish, or the Anglo-American tradition. You cannot 
adopt English political words, English literary words, 
English religious words, the terms of sport or ethics, 
without in some measure remaking your mind on a 
new model. If you fail or refuse, your child will not. 
He is forcibly made an American, in ideas at least, 
and chiefly by language. 

I submit that it is impossible for an alien thoroughly 



82 On the American Tradition 

to absorb and understand Lincoln's Gettysburg Speech 
or Hawthorne's "Scarlet Letter" without working a 
slight but perceptible transformation in the brain, with- 
out making himself an heir of a measure of English 
tradition. And the impact of English as a spoken 
tongue, and the influence of its literature as the only- 
read literature, are great beyond ordinary conception. 
Communities where a foreign language is read or 
spoken only delay the process, they cannot stop it. 

The foreigner, it is true, has modified the English 
language precisely as he has modified the American 
tradition. Continental Europe is audible in the Ameri- 
can tongue, as it is evident in the American mind; 
but it is like the English or the Spanish touch upon 
the Gothic style in architecture — there is modification, 
but not fundamental change. 

Many a foreign-born American has been restless 
under this domination. The letters and memoirs of 
the French immigrants from revolutionary France ex- 
press discomfort freely. The Germans of '48, them- 
selves the bearers of a high civilization, have often 
confessed an unwilling assimilation. The Germans of 
earlier migrations herded apart like the later Scandi- 
navians, in part to avoid the tyranny of tongue. 

Imagine a German coming here in early manhood. 
His tradition is not English; he owes nothing to a 
contemporary England that he but dimly knows. 
Speaking English, perhaps only English, he grows im- 
patient with a tongue every concept of which has an 
English coloring. The dominance of the language, and 



The American Tradition 83 

especially of its literature, irks him. He no longer 
wants to think as a German; he wants to think as an 
American; but the medium of his thought must be 
English. His anger often enough goes out against Eng- 
Hsh history, English literature. He is easily irritated 
by England. But it is the American past that binds 
and is converting him. Such consciousness of the 
power of environment is perhaps rare, but the fact 
is common. In our few centuries of history millions 
have been broken into English, with all that implies. 
Millions have experienced the inevitable discomfort 
of a foreign tradition which makes alien their father- 
lands, and strangers of their children. This is an 
"Anglo-Saxon" domination. But it is useless to struggle 
against it. 

There is a similar discomfort among certain Ameri- 
can authors, especially just now, when, for the first 
time since the Civil War and the materialism that suc- 
ceeded it, we are finding our national self once again 
in literature. Mr. Mencken and Mr. Dreiser have 
vigorously expressed this annoyance with American tra- 
dition. They wish to break with it — at least Mr. 
Dreiser does — ^break with it morally, spiritually, es- 
thetically. Let the dotards, he says, bury their dead. 

Mr. Mencken wishes to drive us out of Colonialism. 
He says that Longfellow has had his day, and that 
it is time to stop imitating Addison, time to be ashamed 
of aping Stevenson, Kipling, or John Masefield. He 
is right. 

But when it comes to disowning English literature 



84 On the American Tradition 

and the past of American literature (as many a writer 
directly or by implication would have us) in order to 
become 100 per cent American, let us first take breath 
long enough to reflect that, first, such a madcap career 
is eminently undesirable, and, second, utterly impossi- 
ble. It is a literature which by general admission is 
now the richest and most liberal in the world of living 
speech. English is a tongue less sonorous than Italian, 
less fine than French, less homely than German, but 
more expressive, more flexible, than these and all others. 
Its syntax imposes no burdens, its traditions are weighty 
only upon the vulgar and the bizarre. Without its 
literary history, American literature in general, and 
usually in particular, is not to be understood. That 
we have sprung from a Puritanical loin, and been nour- 
ished in the past from the breast of Victorianism, is 
obvious. In this we have been not too much, but too 
narrowly, English. We have read Tennyson when it 
might have been better to have read Shakespeare or 
Chaucer. But to wish to break with English literature 
in order to become altogether American is like desiring 
to invent an entirely new kind of clothes. I shall 
not give up trousers because my fourth great-grand- 
father, who was a Yorkshireman, wore them, and his 
pattern no longer fits my different contour. I shall 
make me a pair better suiting my own shanks — ^yet 
they shall still be trousers. But in any case, language 
binds us. 

Indeed, in this welter of newcomers here in America, 
whose children learn, read, write only English, the tra- 



The American Tradition 85 

dition of Anglo-American literature is all that holds 
us by a thread above chaos. If we could all be made 
to speak German, or Italian, or Spanish, there would 
be cause, but no excuse, for an attempted revolution. 
But English is dominant here and will remain so. 
Could we hope to make an American literary language 
without dependence on English literature, a protective 
tariff on home-made writing, or an embargo against 
books more than a year old, or imported from across 
the Atlantic, would be worth trying; but the attempts 
so far are not encouraging. This has not been the 
way in the past by which original literatures have been 
made. They have sucked nourishment where it could 
best be found, and grown great from the strength that 
good food gave them. 

One can sympathize with the desire to nationalize 
our literature at all costs ; and can understand lashings 
out at the tyranny of literary prestige which England 
still exercises. But the real question is: shall the 
English of Americans be good English or bad English; 
shall a good tradition safeguard change and experi- 
ment, or shall we have chaotic vulgarity like the Low 
Latin of the late Roman Empire? 

The truth is that our language is tradition, for it 
holds tradition in solution like iron in wine. And here 
lie the secret and the power of American, "Anglo- 
Saxon" domination. 

What is to be done about it? Shall anything be 
done about it? The Anglomaniac is helpless before 



86 On the American Tradition 

the fact of language. The most he can do is to attack, 
and uproot if he can, the American tradition. 

There is nothing sacrosanct in this American tradi- 
tion. Like all traditions it is stiff, it will clasp, if we 
allow it, the future in the dead hand of precedent. 
It can be used by the designing to block progress. But 
as traditions go it is not conservative. Radicalism, 
indeed, is its child. Political and religious radicalism 
brought the Pilgrims to New England, the Quakers 
to Pennsylvania; political and economic radicalism 
made the Revolution against the will of American con- 
servatives; political and social radicalism made the 
Civil War inevitable and gave it moral earnestness. 
Radicalism, whether you like it or not, is much more 
American than what some people mean by "Ameri- 
canism" to-day. And its bitterest opponents in our 
times would quite certainly have become Nova Scotian 
exiles if they had been alive and likeminded in 1783. 

Nor is this American tradition impeccable in the 
political ideas, the literary ideals, the social customs 
it has given us. We must admit a rampant individ- 
ualism in our political practices which is in the very 
best Anglo-American tradition, and yet by no means 
favorable to cooperative government. We admit also 
more Puritanism in our standard literature than art 
can well digest; and more sentiment than is good for 
us; nor is it probable that the traditions and the 
conventions which govern American family life are 
superior to their European equivalents. We should 
welcome (I do not say that we do) liberalizing, broad- 



The American Tradition 87 

ening, enriching influences from other traditions. And 
whether we have welcomed them or not, they have 
come, and to our great benefit. But to graft upon 
the plant is different from trying to pull up the roots. 

We want better arguments than the fear of Anglo- 
Saxon domination before the root pulling begins. We 
wish to know what is to be planted. We desire to 
be convinced that the virtue has gone out of the old 
stock. We want examples of civilized nations that 
have profited by borrowing traditions wholesale, or by 
inventing them. We wish to know if a cultural, a 
literary sans-culottism is possible, except with chaos 
as a goal. Most of all, we expect to fight for and to 
hold our Anglo-American heritage. 

It is not surprising that discontent with our own 
ultimately English tradition has expressed itself by a 
kind of Freudian transformation in anti-English senti- 
ment. Every vigorous nation strains and struggles with 
its tradition, like a growing boy with his clothes, and 
this is particularly true of new nations with old tradi- 
tions behind them. Our pains are growing pains — a 
malady we have suffered from since the early eighteenth 
century at the latest. Tradition, our own tradition, 
pinches us; but you cannot punch tradition for pinch- 
ing you, or call it names to its face, especially if it proves 
to be your father's tradition, or your next-door neigh- 
bor's. Therefore, since that now dim day when the 
Colonies acquired a self-consciousness of their own, 
many good Americans have chosen England and the 
English to symbolize whatever irked them in their 



88 On the American Tradition 

own tradition. It is from England and the English 
that we have felt ourselves growing away, from which 
we had to grow away in order to be ourselves and not 
a shadow — imitators, second-bests, Colonials. England 
and the English have had our vituperation whenever 
the need to be American has been greatest. And when 
an EngHsh government like Palmers ton's, or Salis- 
bury's, or Lloyd George's, offends some group or race 
among us, a lurking need to assert our individuality, 
or prove that we are not Colonials, leads thousands 
more to join in giving the lion's tail an extra twist. 

This may be unfortunate, but it argues curiously 
enough respect and affection rather than the reverse, 
and it is very human. It is a fact, like growing, and 
is likely to continue until we are fully grown. It will 
reassert itself vehemently until upon our English tra- 
dition we shall have built an American civilization as 
definitely crystallized, a literature as rich and self- 
sufficing, as that of France and England to-day. Three- 
quarters of our national genius went into the creating 
of our political system. Three-quarters of our national 
genius since has gone into the erecting of our economic 
system. Here we are independent — and thick skinned. 
But a national civilization and a national literature 
take more time to complete. 

Cool minds were prepared for a little tail-twisting 
after the great war, even though they could not foresee 
the unfortunate Irish situation in which a British 
government seemed determined to make itself as un- 
English as possible. If there had not been the patriotic 



The American Tradition 89 

urge to assert our essential Americanism more strongly 
than ever, there still would have been a reaction against 
all the pledging and the handshaking, the pother about 
blood and water, the purple patches in every newspaper 
asserting Anglo-Saxonism against the world. I remem- 
ber my own nervousness when, in 191 8, after the best 
part of a year in England, in England's darkest days, 
I came back full of admiration for the pluck of all 
England and the enlightenment of her best minds in 
the great struggle, to hear men who knew little of 
England orating of enduring friendship, and to read 
writers who had merely read of England, descanting 
of her virtues. I felt, and many felt, that excess of 
ignorant laudation which spells certain reaction into 
ignorant dispraise. No wonder that Americans whose 
parents happened to be Germans, Italians, Jews, or 
Irish grew weary of hearing of the essential virtues 
of the Anglo-Saxon race. There never was such a 
race. It was not even English blood, but English in- 
stitutions that created America; but Liberty Loan ora- 
tors had no time to make fine distinctions of that kind. 
They talked, and even while the cheers were ringing 
and the money rolled in dissent raised its tiny head. 
Dissent was to be expected; antagonism against a 
tradition made by English minds and perpetuated in 
English was natural after a war in which not merely 
nationalism, but also every racial instinct, has been 
quickened and made sensitive. But tout comprendre, 
c'est tout pardonner, is only partly true in this instance. 
We should understand, and be tolerant with, the strain- 



90 On the American Tradition 

ings against tradition of folk to whom it is still partly 
alien; we should diagnose our own growing pains and 
not take them too seriously. Nevertheless, the better 
more violent movements of race and national prejudice 
are understood, the less readily can they be pardoned, 
if by pardon one means easy tolerance. 

It is not inconceivable that we shall have to face 
squarely a split between those who prefer the Ameri- 
can tradition and those who do not, although where 
the cleavage line would run, whether between races 
or classes, is past guessing. There are among us appar- 
ently men and women who would risk wars, external 
or internal, in order to hasten the discordant day; 
although just what they expect as a result, whether 
an Irish-German state organized by German efficiency 
and officered by graduates of Tammany Hall, or a 
pseudo-Russian communism, is not yet clear. In any 
case, the time is near when whoever calls himself 
American will have to take his stand and do more 
thinking, perhaps, than was necessary in 191 7. He 
will need to know what tradition is, what his own con- 
sists of, and what he would do without it. He will need 
especially to rid himself of such simple and fallacious 
ideas as that what was good enough for his grandfather 
is good enough for him; or that, as some of our more 
reputable newspapers profess to think, the Constitution 
has taken the place once held by the Bible, and con- 
tains the whole duty of man and all that is necessary 
for his welfare. He will need to think less of 100 per 
cent Americanism, which, as it is commonly used. 



The American Tradition 91 

means not to think at all, and more of how he himself 
is molding American tradition for the generation that is 
to follow. If he is not to be a pawn merely in the 
struggle for American unity, he must think more clearly 
and deeply than has been his habit in the past. 

But whatever happens in America (and after the 
sad experiences of prophets in the period of war and 
reconstruction, who would prophesy ), let us cease abus- 
ing England whenever we have indigestion in our own 
body politic. It is seemingly inevitable that the writers 
of vindictive editorials should know little more of 
England as she is to-day than of Russia or the Chinese 
Republic; inevitable, apparently, that for them the 
Irish policy of the Tory group in Parliament, Indian 
unrest, and Lloyd George, are all that one needs to 
known about a country whose liberal experiments in 
industrial democracy since the war, and whose courage 
in reconstruction, may well make us hesitate in dis- 
praise. But it is not inevitable that Americans who 
are neither headline and editorial writers, nor im- 
passioned orators, regardless of facts, should continue 
to damn the English because their ancestors and ours 
founded America. 



Back to Nature 

No one tendency in life as we live it in America to-day 
is more characteristic than the impulse, as recurrent 
as summer, to take to the woods. Sometimes it dis- 
guises itself under the name of science; sometimes it 
is mingled with hunting and the desire to kill; often 
it is sentimentalized and leads strings of gaping "stu- 
dents" bird-hunting through the wood lot; and again 
it perilously resembles a desire to get back from civi- 
lization and go "on the loose." Say your worst of it, 
still the fact remains that more Americans go back 
to nature for one reason or another annually than 
any civilized men before them. And more Americans, 
I fancy, are studying nature in clubs or public schools 
— or, in summer camps and the Boy Scouts, imitating 
nature's creatures, the Indian and the pioneer — than 
even statistics could make believable. 

What is the cause? In life, it is perhaps some sur- 
vival of the pioneering instinct, spending itself upon 
fishing, or bird-hunting, or trail hiking, much as the 
fight instinct leads us to football, or the hunt instinct 
sends every dog sniffing at dawn through the streets 
of his town. Not every one is thus atavistic, if this 
be atavism; not every American is sensitive to spruce 
spires, or the hermit thrush's chant, or white water 
in a forest gorge, or the meadow lark across the 

92 



Back to Nature 93 

frosted fields. Naturally. The surprising fact is that 
in a bourgeois civilization like ours, so many are 
affected. 

And yet what a criterion nature love or nature in- 
difference is. It seems that if I can try a man by 
a silent minute in the pines, the view of a jay pirating 
through the bushes, spring odors, or December flush 
on evening snow, I can classify him by his reactions. 
Just where I do not know; for certainly I do not put 
him beyond the pale if his response is not as mine. 
And yet he will differ, I feel sure, in more significant 
matters. He is not altogether of my world. Nor 
does he enter into this essay. There are enough with- 
out him, and of every class. In the West, the very 
day laborer pitches his camp in the mountains for his 
two weeks' holiday. In the East and Middle West, 
every pond with a fringe of hemlocks, or hill view 
by a trolley line, or strip of ocean beach, has its 
cluster of bungalows where the proletariat perform 
their villeggiatura as the Italian aristocracy did in 
the days of the Renaissance. Patently the impulse ex- 
ists, and counts for something here in America. 

It counts for something, too, in American literature. 
Since our writing ceased being colonial English and 
began to reflect a race in the making, the note of woods- 
longing has been so insistent that one wonders whether 
here is not to be found at last the characteristic "trait" 
that we have all been patriotically seeking. 

I do not limit myself in this statement to the pro- 
fessed "nature writers" of whom we have bred far 



94 On the American Tradition 

more than any other race with which I am familiar. 
In the list — which I shall not attempt — of the greatest 
American writers, one cannot fail to include Emerson, 
Hawthorne, Thoreau, Cooper, Lowell, and Whitman. 
And every one of these men was vitally concerned 
with nature, and some were obsessed by it. Lowell 
was a scholar and man of the world, urban there- 
fore; but his poetry is more enriched by its homely 
New England background than by its European polish. 
Cooper's ladies and gentlemen are puppets merely, his 
plots melodrama; it is the woods he knew, and the 
creatures of the woods, Deerslayer and Chingachgook, 
that preserve his books. Whitman made little distinc- 
tion between nature and human nature, perhaps too 
little. But read ''Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rock- 
ing" or ''The Song of the Redwood-Tree," and see how 
keen and how vital was his instinct for native soil. 
As for Hawthorne, you could make a text-book on 
nature study from his "Note-Books." He was an 
imaginative moralist first of all; but he worked out 
his visions in terms of New England woods and hills. 
So did Emerson. The day was "not wholly profane" 
for him when he had "given heed to some natural 
object." Thoreau needs no proving. He is at the 
forefront of all field and forest lovers in all languages 
and times. 

These are the greater names. The lesser are as 
leaves in the forest: Audubon, Burroughs, Muir, Clar- 
ence King, Lanier, Robert Frost, and many more — 
the stream broadening and shallowing through literary 



Back to Nature 95 

scientists and earnest forest lovers to romantic "nature 
fakers/' literary sportsmen, amiable students, and tens 
of thousands of teachers inculcating this American ten- 
dency in another generation. The phenomenon asks 
for an explanation. It is more than a category of 
American literature that I am presenting; it is an 
American trait. 

The explanation I wish to proffer in this essay may 
sound fantastical; most explanations that explain any- 
thing usually do — at first. I believe that this vast rush 
of nature into American literature is more than a mere 
reflection of a liking for the woods. It represents a 
search for a tradition, and its capture. 

Good books, Kke well-built houses, must have tradi- 
tion behind them. The Homers and Shakespeares and 
Goethes spring from rich soil left by dead centuries; 
they are like native trees that grow so well nowhere 
else. The little writers — ^hacks who sentimentalize to 
the latest order, and display their plot novelties like 
bargains on an advertising page — are just as traditional. 
The only difference is that their tradition goes back 
to books instead of life. Middle-sized authors — the 
very good and the probably enduring — are successful 
largely because they have gripped a tradition and fol- 
lowed it through to contemporary life. This is what 
Thackeray did in "Vanity Fair," Howells in "The Rise 
of Silas Lapham," and Mrs. Wharton in "The House 
of Mirth." But the back-to-nature books — both the 
sound ones and those shameless exposures of the private 
emotions of ground hogs and turtles that call themselves 



96 On the American Tradition 

nature books — are the most traditional of all. For they 
plunge directly into what might be called the adven- 
tures of the American sub-consciousness. 

It is the sub-consciousness that carries tradition into 
literature. That curious reservoir where forgotten ex- 
periences lie waiting in every man's mind, as vivid 
as on the day of first impression, is the chief concern 
of psychologists nowadays. But it has never yet had 
due recognition from literary criticism. If the sub- 
consciousness is well stocked, a man writes truly, his 
imagination is vibrant with human experience, he sets 
his own humble observation against a background of 
all he has learned and known and forgotten of civiliza- 
tion. If it is under-populated, if he has done little, felt 
little, known little of the traditional experiences of 
the intellect, he writes thinly. He can report what 
he sees, but it is hard for him to create. It was 
Chaucer's rich sub-consciousness that turned his sim- 
ple little story of Chauntecleer into a comment upon 
humanity. Other men had told that story — and made 
it scarcely more than trivial. It is the promptings 
of forgotten memories in the sub-consciousness that 
give to a simple statement the force of old, un- 
happy things, that keep thoughts true to experience, 
and test fancy by life. The sub-consciousness is the 
governor of the waking brain. Tradition— which is 
just man's memory of man — flows through it like an 
underground river from which rise the springs of 
e very-day thinking. If there is anything remarkable 



Back to Nature 97 

about a book, look to the sub-consciousness of the 
writer and study the racial tradition that it bears. 

Now, I am far from proposing to analyze the Ameri- 
can sub-consciousness. No man can define it. But 
of this much I am certain. The American habit of 
going "back to nature" means that in our sub-con- 
sciousness nature is peculiarly active. We react to 
nature as does no other race. We are the descendants 
of pioneers — all of us. And if we have not inherited 
a memory of pioneering experiences, at least we possess 
inherited tendencies and desires. The impulse that 
drove Boone westward may nowadays do no more 
than send some young Boone canoeing on Temagami, 
or push him up Marcy or Shasta to inexplicable hap- 
piness on the top. But the drive is there. And fur- 
thermore, nature is still strange in America. Even 
now the wilderness is far from no American city. 
Birds, plants, trees, even animals have not, as in 
Europe, been absorbed into the common knowledge 
of the race. There are discoveries everywhere for 
those who can make them. Nature, indeed, is vivid 
in a surprising number of American brain cells, mark- 
ing them with a deep and endurable impress. And 
our flood of nature books has served to increase her 
power. 

It was never so with the European traditions that 
we brought to America with us. That is why no one 
reads early American books. They are pallid, ill- 
nourished, because their traditions are pallid. They 



98 On the American Tradition 

drew upon the least active portion of the American 
sub-consciousness, and reflect memories not of experi- 
ence, contact, live thought, but of books. Even Wash- 
ington Irving, our first great author, is not free from 
this indictment. If, responding to some obscure drift 
of his race towards humor and the short story, he 
had not ripened his Augustan inheritance upon an 
American hillside, he, too, would by now seem juice- 
less, withered, like a thousand cuttings from English 
stock planted in forgotten pages of his period. It was 
not until the end of our colonial age and the rise of 
democracy towards Jackson's day, that the rupture 
with our English background became sufficiently com- 
plete to make us fortify pale memories of home by a 
search for fresher, more vigorous tradition. 

We have been searching ever since, and many emi- 
nent critics think that we have still failed to establish 
American literature upon American soil. The old tradi- 
tions, of course, were essential. Not even the most 
self-sufficient American hopes to establish a brand-new 
culture. The problem has been to domesticate Europe, 
not to get rid of her. But the old stock needed a graft, 
just as an old fruit tree needs a graft. It requires 
a new tradition. We found a tradition in New Eng- 
land; and then New England was given over to the 
alien and her traditions became local or historical 
merely. We found another in border life; and then 
the Wild West reached the Pacific and vanished. Time 
and again we have been flung back upon our English 
sources, and forced to imitate a literature sprung from 



I 



Back to Nature 99 

a riper soil. Of course, this criticism, as it stands, is 
too sweeping. It neglects Mark Twain and the tradi- 
tion of the American boy; it neglects Walt Whitman 
and the literature of free and turbulent democracy; 
it neglects Longfellow and Poe and that romantic tra- 
dition of love and beauty common to all Western races. 
But, at least, it makes one understand why the Ameri- 
can writer has passionately sought anything that would 
put an American quality into his transplanted style. 

He has been very successful in local color. But then 
local color is local. It is a minor art. In the field 
of human nature he has fought a doubtful battle. An 
occasional novel has broken through into regions where 
it is possible to be utterly American even while writing 
English. Poems too have followed. But here lie our 
great failures. I do not speak of the "great American 
novel," yet to come. I refer to the absence of a school 
of American fiction, or poetry, or drama, that has 
linked itself to any tradition broader than the romance 
of the colonies. New England of the 'forties, or the 
East Side of New York. The men who most often 
write for all America are mediocre. They strike no 
deeper than a week-old interest in current activity. 
They aim to hit the minute because they are shrewd 
enough to see that for "all America" there is very 
little continuity just now between one minute and the 
next. The America they write for is contemptuous 
of tradition, although worshipping convention, which 
is the tradition of the ignorant. The men who write 
for a fit audience though few are too often local or 



lOO On the American Tradition 

archaic, narrow or European, by necessity if not by 
choice. 

And ever since we began to incur the condescension 
of foreigners by trying to be American, we have been 
conscious of this weak-rootedness in our literature and 
trying to remedy it. This is why our flood of nature 
books for a century is so significant. They may seem 
peculiar instruments for probing tradition— particularly 
the sentimental ones. The critic has not yet admitted 
some of the heartiest among them — ^Audubon's sketches 
of pioneer life, for example — into literature at all. 
And yet, unless I am mightily mistaken, they are signs 
of convalescence as clearly as they are symptoms oi 
our disease. These United States, of course, are infi- 
nitely more important than the plot of mother earth 
upon which they have been erected. The intellectual 
background that we have inherited from Europe is 
more significant than the moving spirit of woods and 
soil and waters here. The graft, in truth, is less valu- 
able than the tree upon which it is grafted. Yet it 
determines the fruit. So with the books of our nature 
lovers. They represent a passionate attempt to accli- 
matize the breed. Thoreau has been one of our most 
original writers. He and his multitudinous followers, 
wise and foolish, have helped establish us in our new 
soil. 

I may seem to exaggerate the services of a group 
of writers who, after all, can show but one great name, 
Thoreau's. I do not think so, for if the heart of the 
nature lover is sometimes more active than his head, 



Back to Nature lOi 

the earth intimacies he gives us are vital to literature 
in a very practical sense. Thanks to the modern sci- 
ence of geography, we are beginning to understand 
the profound and powerful influence of physical en- 
vironment upon men. The geographer can tell you 
why Charleston was aristocratic, why New York is 
hurried and nervous, why Chicago is self-confident. He 
can guess at least why in old communities, like 
Hardy's Wessex or the North of France, the inhabitants 
of villages not ten miles apart will differ in tempera- 
ment and often in temper, hill town varying from 
lowland village beneath it sometimes more than Kan- 
sas City from Minneapolis. He knows that the old 
elemental forces — wind, water, fire, and earth — still 
mold men's thoughts and lives a hundred times more 
than they guess, even when pavements, electric lights, 
tight roofs, and artificial heat seem to make nature 
only a name. He knows that the sights and sounds 
and smells about us, clouds, songs, and wind murmur- 
ings, rain-washed earth, and fruit trees blossoming, en- 
ter into our sub-consciousness with a power but seldom 
appraised. Prison hfe, factory service long continued, 
a clerk's stool, a housewife's day-long duties — these 
things stunt and transform the human animal as noth- 
ing else, because of all experiences they most restrict, 
most impoverish the natural environment. And it is 
the especial function of nature books to make vivid 
and warm and sympathetic our background of nature. 
They make conscious our sub-conscious dependence 
upon earth that bore us. They do not merely inform 



I02 On the American Tradition 

(there the scientist may transcend them), they enrich 
the subtle relationship between us and our environment. 
Move a civilization and its literature from one hemi- 
sphere to another, and their adapting, adjusting services 
become most valuable. Men like Thoreau are worth 
more than we have ever guessed. 

No one has ever written more honest books than 
Thoreau's "Walden," his "Autumn," "Summer," and 
the rest. There is not one literary flourish in the whole 
of them, although they are done with consummate 
literary care; nothing but honest, if not always accu- 
rate, observation of the world of hill-slopes, waves, 
flowers, birds, and beasts, and honest, shrewd philoso- 
phizing as to what it all meant for him, an American. 
Here is a man content to take a walk, fill his mind 
with observation, and then come home to think. Re- 
peat the walk, repeat or vary the observation, change 
or expand the thought, and you have Thoreau. No 
wonder he brought his first edition home, not seriously 
depleted, and made his library of it! Thoreau needs 
excerpting to be popular. Most nature books do. But 
not to be valuable! 

For see what this queer genius was doing. Lovingly, 
laboriously, and sometimes a little tediously, he was 
studying his environment. For some generations his 
ancestors had lived on a new soil, too busy in squeezing 
life from it to be practically aware of its differences. 
They and the rest had altered Massachusetts. Massa- 
chusetts had altered them. Why? To what? The 
answer is not yet ready. But here is one descendant 



Back to Nature 103 

who will know at least what Massachusetts is — wave, 
wind, soil, and the life therein and thereon. He be- 
gins humbly v/ith the little things; but humanly, not 
as the out-and-out scientist goes to work, to classify 
or to study the narrower laws of organic development; 
or romantically as the sentimentalist, who intones his 
"Ah! " at the sight of dying leaves or the cocoon becom- 
ing moth. It is all human, and yet all intensely prac- 
tical with Thoreau. He envies the Indian not because 
he is "wild," or "free," or any such nonsense, but for 
his instinctive adaptations to his background, — because 
nature has become traditional, stimulative with him. 
And sim^ply, almost naively, he sets dovm what he has 
discovered. The land I live in is like this or that; 
such and such life lives in it; and this is what it all 
means for me, the transplanted European, for us, Amer- 
icans, who have souls to shape and characters to mold 
in a new environment, under influences subtler than 
we guess. "I make it my business to extract from 
Nature whatever nutriment she can furnish me, though 
at the risk of endless iteration. I milk the sky and 
the earth." And again: "Surely it is a defect in our 
Bible that it is not truly ours, but a Hebrew Bible. 
The most pertinent illustrations for us are to be drawn 
not from Egypt or Babylonia, but from New England. 
Natural objects and phenomena are the original sym- 
bols or types which express our thoughts and feelings. 
Yet American scholars, having little or no root in the 
soil, commonly strive with all their might to confine 
themselves to the imported symbols alone. All the 



104 ^^ ^^^^ American Tradition 

true growth and experience, the living speech, they 
would fain reject as ^Americanisms.' It is the old 
error which the church, the state, the school, ever com- 
mit, choosing darkness rather than light, holding fast 
to the old and to tradition. When I really know that 
our river pursues a serpentine course to the Merrimac, 
shall I continue to describe it by referring to some 
other river, no older than itself, which is like it, and 
call it a meander? It is no more meandering than 
the Meander is musketaquiding." 

This for Thoreau was going back to nature. Our 
historians of literature who cite him as an example 
of how to be American without being strenuous, as an 
instance of leisure nobly earned, are quite wrong. If 
any man has striven to make us at home in America, 
it is Thoreau. He gave his life to it; and in some 
measure it is thanks to him that with most Americans 
you reach intimacy most quickly by talking about "the 
woods." 

Thoreau gave to this American tendency the touch 
of genius and the depth of real thought. After his 
day the "back-to-nature" idea became more popular 
and perhaps more picturesque. Our literature becomes 
more and more aware of an American background. 
Bobolinks and thrushes take the place of skylarks; 
sumach and cedar begin to be as familiar as heather 
and gorse; forests, prairies, a clear, high sky, a snowy 
winter, a summer of thunderstorms, drive out the misty 
England which, since the days of Cynewulf, our an- 
cestors had seen in the mind's eye while they were 



Back to Nature 105 

writing. Nature literature becomes a category. Men 
make their reputations by means of it. 

No one has yet catalogued — so far as I am aware 
— the vast collection of back-to-nature books that fol- 
lowed Thoreau. No one has ever seriously criticized 
it, except Mr. Roosevelt, who with characteristic vigor 
of phrase, stamped "nature-faking" on its worser half. 
But every one reads in it. Indeed, the popularity of 
such writing has been so great as to make us distrust 
its serious literary value. And yet, viewed interna- 
tionally, there are few achievements in American litera- 
ture so original. I will not say that John Muir and 
John Burroughs, upon whom Thoreau's mantle fell, 
have written great books. Probably not. Certainly 
it is too soon to say. But when you have gathered the 
names of Gilbert White, Jeffries, Fabre, Maeterlinck, 
and in slightly different genres, Izaak Walton, Hudson, 
and Kipling from various literatures you will find few 
others abroad to list with ours. Nor do our men owe 
one jot or tittle of their inspiration to individuals on 
the other side of the water. 

Locally, too, these books are more noteworthy than 
may at first appear. They are curiously passionate, 
and passion in American literature since the Civil War 
is rare. I do not mean sentiment, or romance, or erot- 
icism. I mean such passion as Wordsworth felt for 
his lakes, Byron (even when most Byronic) for the 
ocean, the author of "The Song of Roland" for his 
Franks. Muir loved the Yosemite as a man might 
love a woman. Every word he wrote of the Sierras 



io6 On the American Tradition 

is touched with intensity. Hear him after a day on 
Alaskan peaks: "Dancing down tlie mountain to camp, 
my mind glowing like the sunbeaten glaciers, I found 
the Indians seated around a good fire, entirely happy 
now that the farthest point of the journey was safely 
reached and the long, dark storm was cleared away. 
How hopefully, peacefully bright that night were the 
stars in the frosty sky, and how impressive was the 
thunder of icebergs, rolling, swelling, reverberating 
through the solemn stillness! I was too happy to 
sleep." 

Such passion, and often such style, is to be found 
in all these books when they are good books. Com- 
pare a paragraph or two of the early Burroughs on 
his birch-clad lake country, or Thoreau upon Concord 
pines, with the "natural history paragraph" that Eng- 
lish magazines used to publish, and you will feel it. 
Compare any of the lesser nature books of the mid- 
nineteenth century — Clarence King's "Mountaineering 
in the Sierras," for example — with the current novel 
writing of the period and you will feel the greater 
sincerity. A passion for nature! Except the New 
England passion for ideals. Whitman's passion for de- 
mocracy, and Poe's lonely devotion to beauty, I some- 
times think that this is the only great passion that 
has found its way into American Hterature. 

Hence the "nature fakers." The passion of one 
generation becomes the sentiment of the next. And 
sentiment is easily capitalized. The individual can 
be stirred by nature as she is. A hermit thrush singing 



Back to Nature 107 

in moonlight above a Catskill clove will move him. 
But the populace will require something more sensa- 
tional. To the sparkling water of truth must be added 
the syrup of sentiment and the cream of romance. 
Mr. Kipling, following ancient traditions of the Orient, 
gave personalities to his animals so that stories might 
be made from them. Mr. Long, Mr. Roberts, Mr. 
London, Mr. Thompson-Seton, and the rest, have told 
stories about animals so that the American interest 
in nature might be exploited. The difference is essen- 
tial. If the '^Jungle Books" teach anything it is the 
moral ideals of the British Empire. But our nature 
romancers — a fairer term than "fakers," since they do 
not willingly "fake" — teach the background and tradi- 
tion of our soil. In the process they inject sentiment, 
giving us the noble desperation of the stag, the startling 
wolf-longings of the dog, and the picturesque outlawry 
of the ground hog, — and get a hundred readers where 
Thoreau got one. 

This is the same indictment as that so often brought 
against the stock American novel, that it prefers the 
gloss of easy sentiment to the rough, true fact, that 
it does not grapple direct with things as they are 
in America, but looks at them through optimist's 
glasses that obscure and soften the scene. Neverthe- 
less, I very much prefer the sentimentalized animal 
story to the sentimentalized man story. The first, as 
narrative, may be romantic bosh, but it does give one 
a loving, faithful study of background that is worth 
the price that it costs in illusion. It reaches my emo- 



io8 On the American Tradition 

tions as a novelist who splashed his sentiment with 
equal profusion never could. My share of the race 
mind is willing even to be tricked into sympathy with 
its environment. I would rather believe that the 
sparrow on my telephone wire is swearing at the robin 
on my lawn than never to notice either of them! 

How curiously complete and effective is the service 
of these nature books, when all is considered. There 
is no better instance, I imagine, of how literature and 
life act and react upon one another. The plain Ameri- 
can takes to the woods because he wants to, he does 
not know why. The writing American puts the woods 
into his books, also because he wants to, although I 
suspect that sometimes he knows very well why. Nev- 
ertheless, the same general tendency, the same impulse, 
lie behind both. But reading nature books makes us 
crave more nature, and every gratification of curiosity 
marks itself upon the sub-consciousness. Thus the 
clear, vigorous tradition of the soil passes through us 
to our books, and from our books to us. It is the 
soundest, the sweetest, if not the greatest and deepest 
inspiration of American literature. In the confusion 
that attends the meeting here of all the races it is 
something to cling to; it is our own. 



Thanks to the Artists 

It would be a wise American town that gave up pay- 
ing "boosters" and began to support its artists. A 
country is just so much country until it has been talked 
about, painted, or put into literature. A town is just 
so many brick and wood squares, inhabited by human 
animals, until some one's creative and interpretative 
mind has given it "atmosphere," by which we mean 
significance. 

America was not mere wild land to the early col- 
onists: it was a country that had already been seen 
through the eyes of enthusiastic explorers and daring 
adventurers, whose airs were sweeter than Europe's, 
whose fruits were richer, where forest and game, and 
even the savage inhabitant, guaranteed a more exciting 
life, full of chance for the future. 

New England was not just so much stony acre and 
fishing village for the men of the 'twenties and 'forties. 
It was a land haloed by the hopes and sufferings of 
forefathers, where every town had its record of struggle 
known to all by word of mouth or book. 

And when the New Englanders pushed westward, it 
was to a wilderness which already had its hterature, 
along trails of which they had read, and into regions 
familiar to them in imagination. 

Say what you please, and it is easy to say too much, 
of the imitativeness of American literature as Irving, 

109 



no On the American Tradition 

Cooper, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Thoreau, Twain, and 
Howells wrote it, nevertheless, it was more than justi- 
fied by the human significance it gave to mere land 
in America; and it is richer and more valuable than 
much later writing just because of this attempt. With- 
out Hawthorne and Thoreau, New England would have 
lost its past; without Cooper and Parkman the word 
^'frontier" would mean no more than "boundary" to 
most of us. 

It is foolish to lay a burden on art, and to say, for 
example, that American novelists must accept the same 
obligation to cities and country to-day. But we may 
justly praise and thank them when they do enrich 
this somewhat monotonous America that has been 
planed over by the movies, the Saturday Evening Post, 
quick transportation, and the newspaper with its syndi- 
cated features, until it is as repetitive as a tom-tom. 

After the Civil War every one began to move in 
America, and the immigrants, moving in, moved also, 
so that roots were pulled up everywhere and the town 
one lived in became as impersonal as a hotel, the farm 
no more human than a seed-bed. Literature of the 
time shows this in two ways: the rarity of books that 
give a local habitation and a name to the familiar, 
contemporary scene; and a romantic interest, as of the 
half-starved, in local color stories of remote districts 
where history and tradition still meant something in 
the lives of the inhabitants. 

It is encouraging to see how rapidly all this is chang- 
ing. In poetry the Middle West and New England 



Thanks to the Artists iii 

have been made again to figure in the imagination. 
Rural New Hampshire and Illinois are alive to-day 
for those who have read Masters, Lindsay, and Frost. 
In prose Chicago, New York, New Haven, Richmond, 
Detroit, San Francisco, and the ubiquitous Main Street 
of a hundred Gopher Prairies have become wayfares 
for the memory of the reader, as well as congeries of 
amusement and trade. In particular our universities, 
which in the 'eighties and 'nineties were darkly lit by 
a few flaring torches of mawkish romance, have been 
illumined for the imagination by a series of stories 
that already begin to make the undergraduate compre- 
hend his place in one of the richest streams of history, 
and graduates to understand their youth. Poole's 
^'The Harbor" (which served both college and city), 
Owen Johnson's "Stover at Yale," Norris's ''Salt," Fitz- 
gerald's 'This Side of Paradise," Stephen Benet's "The 
Beginning of Wisdom" — these books and many others 
have, like the opening chapters of Compton Macken- 
zie's English "Sinister Street," given depth, color, and 
significance to the college, which may not increase its 
immediate and measurable efficiency but certainly 
strengthen its grip upon the imagination, and there- 
fore upon life. 

Planners, builders, laborers, schemers, executives 
make a city, a county, a university habitable, give 
them their bones and their blood. Poets and novelists 
make us appreciate the life we live in them, give them 
their souls. The best "boosters" are artists, because 
their boosting lasts. 



To-day in American Literature 
Addressed to the British"^ 



The analysis of conditions and tendencies in contempo- 
rary American literature which I wish to present in 
this lecture, requires historical background, detailed 
criticism, and a study of development. I have time 
for reference to none of these, and can only summarize 
the end of the process. If, therefore, I seem to gen- 
eralize unduly, I hope that my deficiencies may be 
charged against the exigencies of the occasion. But 
I generalize the more boldly because I am speaking, 
after all, of an English literature; not in a Roman- 
Greek relationship of unnaturalized borrowings (for 
we Americans imitate less and less), but English by 
common cultural inheritance, by identical language, 
and by deeply resembling character. Nevertheless, the 
more American literature diverges from British (and 
that divergence is already wide) the more truly Eng- 
lish, the less colonial does it become. A Briton should 
not take unkindly assertions of independence, even 
such ruffled independence as Lowell expressed in "The 
Biglow Papers": 

*This lecture was, in fact, delivered in the summer of 1918 
at Cambridge University as part of a summer session devoted 
to the United States of America. It is reprinted in lecture form 
in order that the point of view may carry its own explanation. 

112 



To-day in American Literature 113 

I guess the Lord druv down Creation's spiles 

'Thout no gret helpin' from the British Isles, 

An' could contrive to keep things pooty stiff 

Ef they withdrawed from business in a miff; 

I han't no patience with such swelling fellers ez 

Think God can't forge 'thout them to blow the bellerses. 



I desire neither to apologize for American literature, 
nor to boast of it. No apology is necessary now, what- 
ever Sydney Smith may have thought in earlier days: 
and it is decidedly not the time to boast, for so far 
literature has usually been a by-product in the develop- 
ment of American aptitudes. But it may be useful to 
state broadly at the beginning some of the difficulties 
and the closely related advantages that condition the 
making of literature in the United States. 

The critic of American literature usually begins in 
this fashion: America, in somewhat over a century, has 
built up a political and social organization admittedly 
great. She has not produced, however, a great litera- 
ture: great writers she has produced, but not a great 
literature. The reason is, that so much energy has been 
employed in developing the resources of a great coun- 
try, that little has been left to expend in creative imagi- 
nation. The currents of genius have flowed toward 
trade, agriculture, and manufacturing, not esthetics. 

This explanation is easy to understand, and is there- 
fore plausible, but I do not believe that it is accurate. 
It is not true that American energy has been absorbed 
by business. Politics, and politics of a creative char- 



114 O^ ^^^ American Tradition 

acter, has never lacked good blood in the United States. 
Organization, and organization of a kind requiring the 
creative intellect, has drawn enormously upon our en- 
ergies, especially since the Civil War, and by no means 
all of it has been business organization. Consider our 
systems of education and philanthropy, erected for 
vast needs. And I venture to guess that more varieties 
of religious experience have arisen in America than 
elsewhere in the same period. After all, why expect a 
century and a half of semi-independent intellectual ex- 
istence to result in a great national literature? Can 
other countries, other times, show such a phenomenon? 

No, if we have been slow in finding ourselves 
in literature, in creating a school of expression like 
the Elizabethan or the Augustan, the difficulties are 
to be sought elsewhere than in a lack of energy. 

Seek them first of all in a weakening of literary 
tradition. The sky changes, not the mind, said Horace, 
but this is true only of the essentials of being. The 
great writers of our common English tradition — 
Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, and many others — are 
as good for us as they are good for you. It is even 
whispered that our language is more faithful to their 
diction than is yours. But the conditions of life in 
a new environment bring a multitude of minor changes 
with them. To begin with little things, our climate, 
our birds, our trees, our daily contact with nature, are 
all different. Your mellow fluting blackbird, your 
wise thrush that sings each song twice over, your high- 
fluttering larks we do not know. Our blackbird creaks 



To-day in American Literature 115 

discordantly, our plaintive lark sings from the meadow 
tussock, our thrush chimes his heavenly bell from 
forest dimness. And this accounts, may I suggest in 
passing, for the insistence upon nature in American 
writing, from Thoreau down. Our social and economic 
experience has been widely different also; and all this, 
plus the results of a break in space and time with 
the home country of our language, weakened that tradi- 
tional influence which is so essential for the production 
of a national literature. It had to be; good will come 
of it; but for a time we vacillated, and we still vacillate, 
like a new satellite finding its course. 

Again, the constant shift of location within America 
has been a strong delaying factor. Moving-day has 
come at least once a generation for most American 
families since the days of William Penn or The May- 
flower. The president of a Western university, who 
himself, as a baby, had been carried across the Alle- 
ghenies in a sling, once told me the history of his 
family. It settled in Virginia in the seventeenth cen- 
tury, and moved westward regularly each generation, 
until his father, the sixth or seventh in line, had reached 
California. On the return journey he had got as far 
as Illinois, and his son was moving to New York! 
The disturbing effect upon literature of this constant 
change of soils and environment is best proved by 
negatives. Wherever there has been a settled com- 
munity in the United States — in New England of the 
'forties and again in the 'nineties, in the Middle West 
and California to-day — one is sure to find a literature 



ii6 On the American Tradition 



^1 



with some depth and solidity to it. The New England 
civilization of the early nineteenth century, now ma- 
terially altered, was a definable culture, with five gen- 
erations behind it, and strong roots in the old world. 
From it came the most mature school of American 
literature that so far we have possessed. 

Still another difficulty must be added. The social. 
Pessimists, who see in our Eastern states a mere con- 
geries of all the white races, and some not white, bewail 
the impossibility of a real nation in America. But 
the racial problem has always been with us, nor has 
it by any means always been unsolved. Before the 
Revolution, we were English, Scottish, Welsh, Low 
German, Huguenot, Dutch, and Swedish. Before the 
Civil War, we were the same plus the Irish and the 
Germans of '48. And now we add Slavs, Jews, Greeks, 
and Italians. I do not minimize the danger. But let 
it be understood that while our civilization has always 
been British (if that term is used in its broadest sense) 
our blood has always been mixed, even in Virginia and 
New England. This has made it hard for us to feel 
entirely at home in the only literary tradition we pos- 
sessed and cared to possess. We have been like the 
man with a ready-made suit. The cloth is right, but 
the cut must be altered before the clothes will fit him. 

And finally, America has always been decentralized 
intellectually. It is true that most of the books and 
magazines are published in New York, and have always 
been published there, or in Boston or Philadelphia. 
But they have been written all over a vast country by 



To-day in American Literature iiy 

men and women who frequently never see each other 
in the flesh. There has been no center Hke London, 
where writers can rub elbows half-a-dozen times a year. 
Boston was such a capital once; only, however, for 
New England. New York is a clearing-house of litera- 
ture now; but the writing is, most of it, done elsewhere. 
It is curious to speculate what might have happened if 
the capital of the United States had been fixed at New 
York instead of Washington! 

From this decentralization there results a lack of 
literary self-confidence that is one of the most impor- 
tant factors in the intellectual life of America. The 
writer in Tucson or Minneapolis or Bangor is de- 
pendent upon his neighbors to a degree impossible in 
Manchester or Glasgow or York. He is marooned 
there, separated in space and time, if not in mind, 
from men and women who believe, as he may believe, 
in the worth of literary standards, in the necessity of 
making not the most easily readable book, but the best. 
Here is one cause of the feebleness of many American 
"literary" books. 

Nevertheless, this very decentralization may have, 
when we reach literary maturity, its great advantages. 
It is difficult to over-estimate the color, the variety, 
the verve of American life. And much of this comes 
not from the push and "hustle" and energy of America 
— for energy is just energy all the world over — but 
is rather to be found in the new adjustments of race 
and environment which are multiplying infinitely all 
over the United States. It is true that American civili- 



Ii8 On the American Tradition 

zation seems to be monotonous — that one sees the same 
magazines and books, the same moving-picture shows, 
the same drug-stores, trolley cars, and hotels on a 
New York model, hears the same slang and much the 
same general conversation from New Haven to Los 
Angeles. But this monotony is superficial. Beneath 
the surface there are infinite strainings and divergences 
— the peasant immigrant working toward, the well- 
established provincial holding to, the wide-ranging mind 
of the intellectual working away from, this dead level 
of conventional standards. Where we are going, it 
is not yet possible to say. Quite certainly not toward 
an un-British culture. Most certainly not toward a 
culture merely neo-English. But in any case, it is 
because San Francisco and Indianapolis and Chicago 
and Philadelphia have literary republics of their own, 
sovereign like our states, yet highly federalized also 
in a common bond of American taste and ideals which 
the war made stronger — it is this fact that makes it 
possible to record, as American writers are already 
recording, the multifarious, confused development of 
racial instincts working into a national consciousness. 
Localization is our difficulty; it is also the only means 
by which literature can keep touch with life in so 
huge a congeries as America. If we can escape pro- 
vincialism and yet remain local, all will be well. 

So far I have been merely defining the terms upon 
which literature has been written in America. Let me 
add to these terms a classification. If one stretches 
the meaning of literature to cover all writing in prose 



To-day in American Literature 119 

or verse that is not simply informative, then four 
categories will include all literary writing in America 
that is in any way significant. We have an artistocratic 
and a democratic literature; we have a dilettante and a 
vast bourgeois literature. 

In using the term aristocratic literature I have in 
mind an intellectual rather than a social category. I 
mean all writing addressed to specially trained intelli- 
gence, essays that imply a rich background of knowl- 
edge and taste, stories dependent upon psychological 
analysis, poetry which is austere in content or com- 
plex in form. I mean Henry James and Sherwood An- 
derson, Mr. Cabell, Mr. Hergesheimer, and Mrs. Whar- 
ton, Agnes Repplier, Mr. Crothers, Mr. Sherman, and 
Mr. Colby, 

By democratic literature I mean all honest writing, 
whether crude or carefully wrought, that endeavors 
to interpret the American scene in typical aspects for 
all who care to read. I mean Walt Whitman and 
Edgar Lee Masters; I mean a hundred writers of short 
stories who, lacking perhaps the final touch of art, 
have nevertheless put a new world and a new people 
momentarily upon the stage. I mean the addresses of 
Lincoln and of President Wilson. 

With dilettante literature I come to a very different 
and less important classification: the vast company — 
how vast few even among natives suspect — of would-be 
writers, who in every town and county of the United 
States are writing, writing, writing what they hope to 
be literature, what is usually but a pallid imitation of 



I20 On the American Tradition 

worn-out literary forms. More people seem to be en- 
gaged in occasional production of poetry and fiction — 
and especially of poetry — in America, than in any single 
money-making enterprise characteristic of a great in- 
dustrial nation. The flood pours through every edi- 
torial office in the land, trickles into the corners of 
country newspapers, makes short-lived dilettante maga- 
zines, and runs back, most of it, to its makers. It is 
not literature, for the bulk is bloodless, sentimental, 
or cheap, but it is significant of the now passionate 
American desire to express our nascent soul. 

My chief difficulty is to explain what I mean by 
bourgeois literature. The flood of dilettante writing 
is subterranean; it is bourgeois literature that makes 
the visible rivers and oceans of American writing. And 
these fluid areas are like the lakes on maps of Central 
Asia — bounds cannot be set to them. One finds maga- 
zines (and pray remember that the magazine is as great 
a literary force as the book in America), one finds 
magazines whose entire function is to be admirably 
bourgeois for their two million odd of readers. And 
in the more truly literary and "aristocratic" periodicals, 
in the books published for the discriminating, the 
bourgeois creeps in and often is dominant. The bour- 
geois in American literature is a special variety that 
must not be too quickly identified with the literary 
product that bears the same name in more static civili- 
zations. It is nearly always clever. Witness our short 
stories, which even when calculated not to puzzle the 
least intelligence nor to transcend the most modest 



To-day in American Literature 121 

limitations of taste, must be carefully constructed and 
told with facility or they will never see the light. And 
this literature is nearly always true to the superficies 
of hfe, to which, indeed, it confines itself. Wild melo- 
drama is more and more being relegated to the 
"movies," soft sentimentaHty still has its place in the 
novel, but is losing ground in the people's library, the 
magazines. Life as the American believes he is living 
it, is the subject of bourgeois literature. But the sad 
limitation upon this vast output is that, whether poetry, 
criticism, or fiction, it does not interpret, it merely 
pictures; and this is the inevitable failure of pages 
that must be written always for a million or more of 
readers. It is standardized literature; and good litera- 
ture, like the best airplanes, cannot be standardized. 

Now the error made by most English critics in en- 
deavoring to estimate the potentialities or the actuali- 
ties of American literature, is to judge under the influ- 
ence of this crushing weight of clever, mediocre writ- 
ing. They feel, quite justly, its enormous energy and 
its terrible cramping power. They see that the best of 
our democratic writers belong on its fringe; see also 
that our makers of aristocratic literature and our dilet- 
tante escape its weight only when they cut themselves 
off from the life beat of the nation. And therefore, 
as a distinguished English poet recently said, America 
is doomed to a hopeless and ever-spreading mediocrity. 

With this view I wish to take immediate issue upon 
grounds that are both actual and theoretical. There is 
a fallacy here to begin with, a fallacious analogy. It 



122 On the American Tradition 

is true, I believe, in Great Britain, and also in France, 
that there are two separate publics; that the readers 
who purchase from the news stands are often as com- 
pletely unaware of literary books for literary people 
as if these bore the imprint of the moon. But even 
in England the distinction is by no means sharp; and 
in America it is not a question of distinctions at all, 
but of gradations. In our better magazines are to be 
found all the categories of which I have written — even 
the dilettante; and it is a bold critic who will assert 
that pages one to twenty are read only by one group, 
and pages twenty to forty only by another. We are 
the most careless readers in the world; but also the 
most voracious and the most catholic. 

And next, let us make up our minds once for all 
that a bourgeois literature — by which, let me repeat, 
I mean a literature that is good without being very 
good, true without being utterly true, clever without 
being fine — is a necessity for a vast population moving 
upward from generation to generation in the intellectual 
scale, toward a level that must be relatively low in 
order to be attainable. Let us say that such a litera- 
ture cannot be real literature. I am content with that 
statement. But it must exist, and good may come of 
it. 

This is the critical point toward which I have been 
moving in this lecture, and it is here that the hopeful 
influence of the American spirit, as I interpret it to- 
day, assumes its importance. That spirit is both ideal- 
istic and democratic. Idealistic in the sense that there 



To-day In American Literature 123 

is a profound and often foolishly optimistic belief in 
America that every son can be better than his father, 
better in education, better in taste, better in the power 
to accomplish and understand. Democratic in this 
sense, that with less political democracy than one finds 
in Great Britain, there is again a fundamental behef 
that every tendency, every taste, every capacity, like 
every man, should have its chance somehow, some- 
where, to get a hearing, to secure its deservings, to 
make, to have, to learn what seems the best. 

A vague desire, you say, resulting in confusion and 
m.ediocrity. This is true and will be true for some 
time longer; but instead of arguing in generalities let 
m.e illustrate these results by the literature I have been 
discussing. 

When brought to bear upon the category of the 
dilettante, it is precisely this desire for "general im- 
provement" that has encouraged such a curious out- 
pouring from mediocre though sensitive hearts. The 
absence of strong literary tradition, the lack of deep 
literary soil, has been responsible for the insipidity of 
the product. The habit of reference to the taste of 
the majority has prevented us from taking this product 
too seriously. Without that instinctive distrust of 
the merely literary common to all bourgeois com- 
munities, we might well be presenting to you as typical 
American literature a gentle weakling whose manners, 
when he has them, have been formed abroad. 

Aristocratic literature has suffered in one respect 
from the restraints of democracy and the compulsions 



124 ^^ ^^^ American Tradition 

of democratic idealism. It has lacked the self-confi- 
dence and therefore the vigor of its parallels in the 
old world. Emerson and Thoreau rose above these 
restrictions, and so did Hawthorne and Poe. But in 
later generations especially, our intellectual poetry and 
intellectual prose is too frequently though by no means 
always less excellent than yours. Nevertheless, thanks 
to the influence of this bourgeois spirit upon the intel- 
lects that in American towns must live with, if not 
share it; thanks, also, to the magazines through which 
our finer minds must appeal to the public rather than 
to a circle or a clique, the nerves of transfer between 
the community at large and the intellectuals are active, 
the tendons that unite them strong. I argue much from 
this. 

Now theoretically, where you find an instinctive and 
therefore an honest passion for the ideals of democ- 
racy, you should find a great literature expressing and 
interpreting the democracy. I have given already 
some reasons why in practice this has not yet become 
an actuality in America. Let me add, in discussing the 
bearing of this argument upon the third category of 
American literature, the democratic, one more. 

I doubt whether we yet know precisely what is meant 
by a great democratic literature. Democracy has been 
in transition at least since the French Revolution; it 
is in rapid transition now. The works which we call 
democratic are many of them expressive of phases 
merely of the popular life, just as so much American lit- 
erature is expressive of localities and groups in America. 



To-day in American Literature 125 

And usually the works of genius that we do possess 
have been written by converted aristocrats, like Tol- 
stoy, and have a little of the fanaticism and over-em- 
phasis of the convert. Or they represent and share the 
turgidity of the minds they interpret, like some of the 
work of Walt Whitman. All this is true, and yet a 
careful reader of American literature must be more im- 
pressed by such prose as Lincoln's, by such poems as 
Whitman's, such fiction as Mark Twain's at his best, 
than by many more elegant works of polite literature. 
For these — and I could add to them dozens of later 
stories and poems, ephemeral perhaps but showing 
what may be done when we burst the bourgeois chain 
— for these are discoveries in the vigor, the poignancy, 
the color of our democratic national life. 

I have already hinted at what seems to me the way 
out and up for American literature. It will not be by 
fine writing that borrows or adapts foreign models, 
even English models which are not foreign to us. It 
will not come through geniuses of the backwoods, 
adopted by some coterie, and succeeding, when they do 
succeed, by their strangeness rather than the value of 
the life they depict. That might have happened in the 
romantic decades of the early nineteenth century; but 
our English literary tradition was a saving influence 
which kept us from gaiicherie, even if it set limits upon 
our strength. Our expectation, so I think, is in the 
slowly mounting level of the vast bourgeois literature 
that fills not excellently, but certainly not discreditably, 
our books and magazines. There, and not in coteries, 



126 On the American Tradition 

is our school of writing. When originality wearies of 
stereotypes and conventions, when energy and ability 
force the editorial hand, and appeal to the desire of 
Americans to know themselves, we shall begin a new 
era in American literature. Our problem is not chiefly 
to expose and attack and discredit the flat conven- 
tionality of popular writing. It is rather to crack the 
smooth and monotonous surface and stir the fire be- 
neath it, until the lava of new and true imaginings can 
pour through. And this is, historically, the probable 
course of evolution. It was the Elizabethan fashion. 
The popular forms took life and fire then. The advice 
of the classicists, who wished to ignore the crude drama 
beloved of the public, was not heeded; it will not be 
heeded now. Our task is to make a bourgeois democ- 
racy fruitful. We must work with what we have. 

Much has been said of the advantage for us, and per- 
haps for the world, which has come from the separa- 
tion of the American colonies from Great Britain. Two 
systems of closely related political thinking, two na- 
tional characters, have developed and been successful 
instead of one. Your ancestors opened the door of de- 
parture for mine, somewhat brusquely it is true, but 
with the same result, if not the same reason, as with 
the boys they sent away to school — they made men 
of us. 

So it is with literature. American literature will 
never, as some critics would persuade us, be a child 
without a parent. In its fundamental character it is, 
and will remain, British, because at bottom the Ameri- 



To-day in American Literature 127 

can character, whatever its blood mixture, is formed 
upon customs and ideals that have the same origin 
and a parallel development with yours. But this litera- 
ture, like our political institutions, will not duplicate; 
like the seedling, it will make another tree and not an- 
other branch. In literature we are still pioneers. I 
think that it may be reserved for us to discover a litera- 
ture for the new democracy of English-speaking peoples 
that is coming — a literature for the common people who 
do not wish to stay common. Like Lincoln's, it will not 
be vulgar; like Whitman's, never tawdry; like Mark 
Twain's, not empty of penetrating thought; like 
Shakespeare's it will be popular. If this should hap- 
pen, as I believe it may, it would be a just return upon 
our share of a great inheritance. 



Time's Mirror 

What is the use of criticizing modern literature unless 
you are willing to criticize modern life? And how many- 
Americans are willing to criticize it with eyes wide 
open? 

The outstanding fact in mass civilization as it exists 
in America and Western Europe to-day is that it moves 
with confidence in only one direction. The workers, 
after their escape from the industrial slavery of the 
last century, have only one plan for the future upon 
which they can unite, a greater share in material bene- 
fits. The possessors of capital have only one program 
upon which they agree, a further exploitation of ma- 
terial resources, for the greater comfort of the com- 
munity and themselves. The professional classes have 
only one professional instinct in common, to discover 
new methods by which man's comfort may be made 
secure. 

In this way of life, as the Buddhist might have called 
it, all our really effective energy discharges itself. Even 
the church is most active in social service, and philoso- 
phy is accounted most original when it accounts for be- 
havior. Theology has become a stagnant science, and, 
to prove the rule by contraries, the main problem of 
man's spiritual relation to the universe, his end in liv- 

128 



Time's Mirror 129 

ing, and the secret of real happiness is left to a senti- 
mental idealism in which reason, as the Greeks knew 
it, has less and less place, and primitive instinct, as the 
anthropologists define it, and the Freudian psycholo- 
gists explain it, is given more and more control. 

The flat truth is that, as a civilization, we are less 
sure of where we are going, where we want to go, how 
and for what we wish to live, than at any intelligent 
period of which we have full record. This is not pessi- 
mism. It is merely a fact, which is dependent upon 
our failure to digest the problems that democracy, ma- 
chinery, feminism, and the destruction of our working 
dogmas by scientific discovery, have presented to us. 
All these things are more likely to be good than bad, 
all bear promise for the future, but all tend to confuse 
contemporary men. New power over nature has been 
given them and they are engaged in seizing it. New 
means of testing preconceived opinion are theirs, and 
they are using them. The numbers which can be called 
intelligent are tremendously augmented and the race to 
secure material comforts has become a mass move- 
ment which will not cease until the objective is won. 

In the meantime, there is only one road which is 
clear — the road of material progress, and whether its 
end lies in the new barbarism of a mechanistic state 
where the mental and physical faculties will decline in 
proportion to the means discovered for healing their 
ills, or whether it is merely a path where the privileged 
leaders must mark step for a while until the unpriv- 
ileged masses catch up with them in material welfare, 



130 On the American Tradition 

no one knows and few that are really competent care 
to inquire. 

Now this obsession with material welfare is the un- 
derlying premise with which all discussion of con- 
temporary literature, and particularly American litera- 
ture, must begin. Ours is a literature of an age without 
dogma, which is to say without a theory of living; the 
literature of an inductive, an experimental period, 
where the really vital attempt is to subdue physical en- 
vironment (for the first time in history) to the needs 
of the common man. It is an age, therefore, interested 
and legitimately interested in behavior rather than 
character, in matter and its laws rather than in the con- 
trol of matter for the purposes of fine living. 

Therefore, our vital literature is behavioristic, nat- 
uralistic, experimental — rightly so I think — and must 
be so until we seek another way. That search cannot 
be long deferred. One expects its beginning at any 
moment, precisely as one expects, and with reason, a 
reaction against the lawless thinking and unrestrained 
impulses which have followed the war. One hopes that 
it will not be to Puritanism, unless it be that stoic state 
of mind which lay behind Puritanism, for no old solu- 
tion will serve. The neo-Puritans to-day abuse the 
rebels, young and old, because they have thrown over 
dogma and discipline. The rebels accuse Puritanism 
for preserving the dogma that cramps instead of frees. 
It is neither return to the old nor the destruction thereof 
that we must seek, but a new religion, a new discipline, 
a new hope, and a new end which can give more signifi- 



Time's Mirror 131 

cance to living than dwellers in our industrial civiliza- 
tion are now finding. 

In the meantime, those who seek literary consola- 
tion are by no means to be urged away from their own 
literature, which contains a perfect picture of our 
feverish times, and has implicit within it the medicine 
for our ills, if they are curable. But they may be ad- 
vised to go again and more often than is now the 
fashion to the writings of those men who found for 
their own time, a real significance, who could formu- 
late a saving doctrine, and who could give to literature 
what it chiefly lacks to-day, a core of ethical convic- 
tion and a view of man in his world sub specie ceternl- 
tatis. It is the appointed time in which to read Dante 
and Milton, Shakespeare, and Goethe, above all Plato 
and the great tragedies of Greece. Our laughter would 
be sweeter if there were more depth of thought and 
emotion to our serious moods. 



The Family Magazine 

Readers who like magazines will be pleased, those who 
do not like them perhaps distressed, to learn, if they 
are not already aware of it, that the magazine as 
we know it to-day is distinctly an American creation. 
They may stir, or soothe, their aroused emotions by 
considering that the magazine which began in Eng- 
land literally as a storehouse of miscellanies attained 
in mid-nineteenth century United States a dignity, a 
harmony, and a format which gave it preeminence 
among periodicals. Harper's and The Century in 
particular shared with Mark Twain and the sewing 
machine the honor of making America familiarly known 
abroad. 

I do not wish to overburden this essay with history, 
but one of the reasons for the appearance of such a 
dominating medium in a comparatively unliterary coun- 
try is relevant to the discussion to follow. The maga- 
zine of those days was vigorous. It was vigorous be- 
cause, unlike other American publications, it was not 
oppressed by competition. Until the laws of interna- 
tional copyright were completed, the latest novels of 
the Victorians, then at their prime, could be rushed 
from a steamer, and distributed in editions which were 
cheap because no royalties had to be paid. Thackeray 
and Dickens could be sold at a discount, where Ameri- 

132 



The Family Magazine 133 

can authors of less reputation had to meet full charges. 
And the like was true of poetry. But the magazine, like 
the newspaper, was not international; it was national 
at least in its entirety, and for it British periodicals 
could not be substituted. Furthermore, it could, and 
did, especially in its earher years, steal unmercifully 
from England, so that a subscriber got both homebrew 
and imported for a single payment. Thus the maga- 
zine flourished in the mid-century while the American 
novel declined. 

A notable instance of this vigor was the effect of the 
growing magazine upon the infant short story. Our 
American magazine made the development of the 
American short story possible by creating a need for 
good short fiction. The rise of our short story, after 
a transitional period when the earliest periodicals and 
the illustrated Annuals sought good short stories and 
could not get them, coincides with the rise of the family 
magazine. It was such a demand that called forth the 
powers in prose of the poet, Poe. And as our maga- 
zine has become the best of its kind, so in the short 
story, and in the short story alone, does American 
literature rival the more fecund literatures of England 
and Europe. 

That a strong and native tendency made the Ameri- 
can magazine is indicated by the effect of our atmo- 
sphere upon the periodical which the English have 
always called a review. Import that form, as was done 
for The North American, The Atlantic Monthly, The 
Forum, or The Yale Review, and immediately the new 



134 ^^ ^^^ American Tradition 

American periodical begins to be a little more of a 
magazine, a little more miscellaneous in its content, a 
little less of a critical survey. Critical articles give 
place to memoirs and sketches, fiction or near fiction 
creeps in. There is always a tendency to lose type and 
be absorbed into the form that the mid-century had 
made so successful: a periodical, handsomely illus- 
trated, with much fiction, some description, a little seri- 
ous comment on affairs written for the general reader, 
occasional poetry, and enough humor to guarantee di- 
version. This is our national medium for literary ex- 
pression — an admirable medium for a nation of long- 
distance commuters. And it is this "family magazine" 
I wish to discuss in its literary aspects. 

The dominance of the family magazine as a purveyor 
of general literature in America has continued, but in 
our own time the species (like other strong organisms) 
has divided into two genres, which are more different 
than, on the surface, they appear. The illustrated 
literary magazine (the family magazine par excellence) 
must now be differentiated from the illustrated journal- 
istic magazine, but both are as American in origin as 
the review and the critical weekly are English. 

It was the native vigor of the family magazine that 
led to the Great Divergence of the 'nineties, which 
older readers will remember well. The literary his- 
torian of that period usually gives a different explana- 
tion. He is accustomed to say that the old-time 
"quality" magazines. Harper's^ Scribner's, and the rest, 
were growing moribund when, by an effort of editorial 



The Family Magazine 135 

genius, Mr. McClure created a new and rebellious type 
of magazine, which was rapidly imitated. We called it, 
as I remember, for want of a better title, the fifteen- 
cent magazine. In the wake of McClure' s, came Col- 
lier'Sj The Saturday Evening Post, The Ladies Home 
Journal, and all the long and profitable train which 
adapted the McClurean discovery to special needs and 
circumstances. 

I do not believe that this is a true statement of what 
happened in the fruitful 'nineties. McClure's was not, 
speaking biologically, a new species at all; it was only 
a mutation in which the recessive traits of the old 
magazine became dominant while the invaluable t5^e 
was preserved. To speak more plainly, the literary 
magazine, as America knew it, had always printed 
news, matured news, often stale news, but still journal- 
ism. Read any number of Harper's in the 'seventies 
for proof. And, pari passu, American journalism was 
eagerly trying to discover some outlet for its finer prod- 
ucts, a medium: where good pictures, sober after- 
thoughts, and the finish that comes from careful writ- 
ing were possible. Harper's Weekly in Civil War days, 
and later, was its creation. 

And now it was happily discovered that the family 
magazine had a potential popularity far greater than 
its limited circulation. With its month-long period of 
incubation, its elastic form, in which story, special arti- 
cle, poetry, picture, humor, could all be harmoniously 
combined, only a redistribution of emphasis was neces- 
sary in order to make broader its appeal. Mr. McClure 



136 On the American Tradition 

journalized the family magazine. He introduced finan- 
cial and economic news in the form of sensational in- 
vestigations, he bid for stories more lively, more im- 
mediate in their interest, more journalistic than we 
were accustomed to read (Kipling's journalistic stories 
for example, were first published in America in Mc- 
Clure's), He accepted pictures in which certainty of 
hitting the public eye was substituted for a guarantee 
of art. And yet, with a month to prepare his number, 
and only twelve issues a year, he could pay for excel- 
lence, and insure it, as no newspaper had ever been 
able to do. And he was freed from the incubus of 
''local news" and day-by-day reports. In brief, under 
his midwifery, the literary magazine gave birth to a 
super-newspaper. 

Needless to say, the great increase in the number of 
American readers and the corresponding decline in the 
average intelligence and discrimination of the reading 
public had much to do with the success of the journal- 
istic magazine. Yet it may be stated, with equal truth, 
that the rapid advance in the average intelligence of 
the American public as a whole made a market for 
a super-newspaper in which nothing was hurried and 
everything well done. The contributions to literature 
through this new journalism have been at least as great 
during the period of its existence as from the "quality'' 
magazine, the contributions toward the support of 
American authors much greater. Like all good jour- 
nalism, it has included real literature when it could get 
and ''get away with it." 



i 



The Family Magazine 137 

Birth, however, in the literary as in the animal world, 
is exhausting and often leaves the parent in a debility 
which may lead to death. The periodical essay of the 
eighteenth century bore the novel of character, and 
died; the Gothic tale of a later date perished of the 
short story to which it gave its heart blood. The 
family magazine of the literary order has been debile, 
so radical critics charge, since its journalistic offspring 
began to sweep America. Shall it die? 

By no means. An America without the illustrated 
literary magazine, dignified, respectable, certain to con- 
tain something that a reader of taste can peruse with 
pleasure, would be an unfamiliar America. And it 
would be a barer America. In spite of our brood of 
special magazines for the literati and the advanced, 
which Mr. Ford Madox Hueffer praises so warmly, we 
are not so well provided with the distributive machin- 
ery for a national culture as to flout a recognized agency 
with a gesture and a sneer. But the family magazine 
has undeniably lost its vigorous appeal, and must be 
reinvigorated. The malady is due to no slackening of 
literary virility in the country; indeed there has prob- 
ably not been so much literary energy in the country 
since the 'forties as now — not nearly so much. Nor is 
it due to a lack of good readers. Nor, in my opinion, 
to the competition of the journalistic magazine. The 
literary magazine does not compete, or at least ought 
not to compete, with its offspring, for it appeals either 
to a different audience or to different tastes. 

Roughly stated, the trouble is that the public for 



138 On the American Tradition 

these excellent magazines has changed, and they have 
not. Their public always was, and is, the so-called 
^'refined" home public. Homes have changed, espe- 
cially "refined" homes, and a new home means a new 
public. 

The refined home nowadays has been to college. 
(There are a million college graduates now in the 
United States.) Forty years ago only scattered mem- 
bers had gone beyond the school. I do not propose to 
exaggerate the influence upon intelligence of a college 
education. It is possible, nay, it is common, to go 
through college and come out in any real sense unedu- 
cated. But it is not possible to pass through college, 
even as a professional amateur in athletics or as an 
inveterate flapper, without rubbing off the insulation 
here and there, without knowing what thought is stir- 
ring, what emotions are poignant, what ideas are 
dominant among the fraction of humanity that leads us. 
Refined homes may not be better or happier than they 
used to be, but if they are intellectual at all, they are 
more vigorously intellectual. 

This means at the simplest that home readers of the 
kind I have been describing want stimulating food, not 
what our grandfathers used to call "slops." Some- 
times they feed exclusively upon highly spiced journal- 
ism, but if they are literary in their tastes they will 
be less content with merely literary stories, with articles 
that are too solid to be good journalism, yet too popu- 
lar to be profound, less content, in short, with dignity 
as a substitute for force. 



The Family Magazine 139 

What should be done about it specifically is a ques- 
tion for editors to answer. But this may be said. If 
the old literary omnibus is to continue, as it deserves, 
to hold the center of the roadway, then it must be 
driven with some vigor of the intellect to match the 
vigor of news which has carried its cheaper contempo- 
rary fast and far. By definition it cannot embrace a 
cause or a thesis, like the weeklies, and thank Heaven 
for that! It is clearly unsafe to stand upon mere dig- 
nity, respectability, or cost. That way lies decadence 
— such as overcame the old Quarterlies, the Annuals, 
and the periodical essayists. Vigor it must get, of a 
kind naturally belonging to its species, not violent, not 
raucous, not premature. It must recapture its public, 
and this is especially the "old American" (which does 
not mean the Anglo-Saxon) element in our mingled 
nation. 

These old Americans are not moribund by any 
means, and it is ridiculous to suppose, as some recent 
importations in criticism do, that a merely respectable 
magazine will represent them. A good many of them, 
to be sure, regard magazines as table decorations, and 
for such a clientele some one some day will publish a 
monthly so ornamental that it will be unnecessary to 
read it in order to share its beneficent influences. The 
remainder are intellectualized, and many of them are 
emancipated from the conventions of the last genera- 
tion, if not from those of their own. These demand a 
new vitality of brain, emotion, and spirit in their liter- 
ary magazine, and it must be given to them. 



140 On the American Tradition 

No better proof of all this could be sought than the 
renaissance in our own times of the reviews and the 
weeklies, probably the most remarkable phenomenon 
in the history of American publishing since the birth 
of yellow journalism. By the weekHes I do not mean 
journals like The Outlook, The Independent, Vanity 
Fair, which are merely special varieties of the typically 
American magazine. I refer, of course, to The New 
Republic, The Nation, The Freeman, The Weekly Re- 
view in its original form, periodicals formed upon an 
old EngHsh model, devoted to the spreading of opinion, 
and consecrated to the propagation of intelligence. 
The success of these weeklies has been out of propor- 
tion to their circulation. Like the old Nation, which 
in a less specialized form was their predecessor, they 
have distinctly affected American thinking, and may 
yet affect our action in politics, education, and social 
relations generally. They are pioneers, with the faults 
of intellectual pioneers, over-seriousness, over-em- 
phasis, dogmatism, and intolerance. Yet it may be said 
fairly that their chief duty, as with the editorial pages 
of newspapers, is to be consistently partisan. At least 
they have proved that the American will take thinking 
when he can get it. And by inference, one assumes 
that he will take strong feeling and vigorous truth in his 
literary magazines. 

The reviews also show how the wind is blowing. The 
review, so-called, is a periodical presenting articles of 
some length, and usually critical in character, upon the 
political, social, and literary problems of the day. The 



The Family Magazine 1 41 

distinction of the review is that its sober form and not 
too frequent appearance enable it to give matured 
opinion with space enough to develop it. 

Clearly a successful review must depend upon a 
clientele with time and inclination to be seriously in- 
terested in discussion, and that is why the review, until 
recently, has best flourished in England where it was 
the organ of a governing class. In America, an in- 
tellectual class who felt themselves politically and so- 
cially responsible, has been harder to discover. We 
had one in the early days of the Republic, when The 
North American Review was founded. It is noteworthy 
that we are developing another now and have seen The 
Yale Review, the late lamented Unpartisan Review, 
and others join The North American, fringed, so to 
speak, by magazines of excerpt (of which much might 
be written), such as The Review of Reviews, Current 
Opinion, and The Literary Digest, in which the func- 
tion of the review is discharged for the great community 
that insists upon reading hastily. 

The review has come to its own with the war and 
reconstruction; which, considering its handicaps, is an- 
other argument that the family magazine should heed 
the sharpening of the American intellect. But, except 
for the strongest members of the family, it is still 
struggling, and still dependent for long life upon cheap- 
ness of production rather than breadth of appeal. 

The difficulty is not so much with the readers as the 
writers. The review must largely depend upon the 
specialist writer (who alone has the equipment for 



142 On the American Tradition 

specialist writing), and the American specialist cannot 
usually write well enough to command general intelli- 
gent attention. This is particularly noticeable in the 
minor reviews where contributions are not paid for 
and most of the writing is, in a sense, amateur, but it 
holds good in the magazines and the national reviews 
also. The specialist knows his politics, his biology, 
or his finance as well as his English or French con- 
temporary, but he cannot digest his subject into words 
— ^he can think into it, but not out of it, and so cannot 
write acceptably for publication. Hence in science 
particularly, but also in biography, in literary criticism, 
and less often in history, we have to depend frequently 
upon Enghsh pens for our illumination. 

The reasons for this very serious deficiency, much 
more carious from every point of view than the special- 
ists realize, are well known to all but the specialists, 
and I do not propose to enter into them here. My point 
is that this very defect, which has made it so difficult 
to edit a valid and interesting review (and so creditable 
to succeed as we have in several instances succeeded), 
is a brake also upon the family magazine in its attempt 
to regain virility. The newspaper magazines have cor- 
nered the market for clever reporters who tap the reser- 
voirs of special knowledge and then spray it acceptably 
upon the public. This is good as far as it goes, but 
does not go far. The scholars must serve us them- 
selves — and are too often incapable. 

Editorial embarrassments are increased, however, by 
the difficulty of finding these intellectualized old Amer- 



The Family Magazine 143 

icans who have drifted away from the old magazines 
and are being painfully collected in driblets by the 
weeklies and the reviews. They do not, unfortunately 
for circulation, all live in a London, or Paris. They 
are scattered in towns, cities, university communities, 
lonely plantations, all over a vast country. Probably 
that intellectualized public upon which all good maga- 
zines as well as all good reviews must depend, has not 
yet become so stratified and homogeneous after the 
upheavals of our generation that a commercial success 
of journalistic magnitude is possible, but it can and 
must be found. 

The success of The Atlantic Monthly in finding a 
sizable and homogeneous public through the country is 
interesting in just this connection. It has, so it is gen- 
erally understood, been very much a question of find- 
ing — of going West after the departing New Englander 
and his children, and hunting him out with the goods 
his soul desired. One remembers the Yankee peddlers 
who in the old days penetrated the frontier with the 
more material products of New England, pans, alma- 
nacs, and soap. But an observer must also note a 
change in the character of The Atlantic itself, how it 
has gradually changed from a literary and political re- 
view, to a literary and social magazine, with every ele- 
ment of the familiar American type except illustrations 
and a profusion of fiction; how in the attempt to be- 
come more interesting without becoming journalistic it 
has extended its operations to cover a wider and wider 
arc of human appeal. It has both lost and gained in 



144 ^^^ ^^^ American Tradition 

the transformation, but it has undoubtedly proved it- 
self adaptable and therefore alive. This is not an 
argument that the reviews should become magazines 
and that the old-line magazine should give up special- 
izing in pictures and in fiction. Of course not. It is 
simply more proof that vigor, adaptability, and a keen 
sense of existing circumstances are the tonics they also 
need. The weekly lacks balance, the review, profes- 
sional skill in the handling of serious subjects, the 
family magazine, a willingness to follow the best public 
taste wherever it leads. 

It has been very difficult in this discussion, which I 
fear has resembled a shot-gun charge rather than a rifle 
bullet, to keep the single aim I have had in mind. The 
history of the periodical in American literary thinking 
has not yet been written. The history of American 
literature has but just been begun. My object has been 
to put the spotlight for a moment upon the t5^ical 
American magazine, with just enough of its environ- 
ment to make a background. What is seen there can 
best be summarized by a comparison. The American 
weekly is like the serious American play of the period. 
It has an over-emphasis upon lesson, bias, thesis, point. 
The review is like much American poetry. It is worthy, 
and occasionally admirable, but as a type it is weak- 
ened by amateur mediocrity in the art of writing. The 
family magazine is like the American short story. It 
has conventionalized into an often successful immo- 
bility. Both must move again, become flexible, vigor- 
ous, or their date will be upon them. And the family 



The Family Magazine 14^ 

magazine, the illustrated literary magazine, is the most 
interesting vehicle of human expression and interpreta- 
tion that we Americans have created. With a new and 
greater success, it will draw all our other efforts with 
it. If it fails, hope for the interesting review, the well- 
balanced weekly, is precarious. If they all submerge, 
we who like to read with discrimination and gusto will 
have to take to books as an exclusive diet, or make our 
choice between boredom and journalism. 



Ill 

The New Generation 



The Young Romantics 

We have talked about the younger generation as if 
youth were a new phenomenon that had to be named 
and described, like a strange animal in the Garden of 
Eden. No wonder that our juniors have become self- 
conscious and have begun to defend themselves. 
Nevertheless, the generation born after the 'eighties 
has had an experience unique in our era. It has been 
urged, first by men and then by events, to discredit the 
statements of historians, the pictures of poets and nov- 
elists, and it has accepted the challenge. The result is 
a literature which speaks for the younger writers bet- 
ter, perhaps, than they speak for themselves, and this 
literature no reader whose brain is still flexible can 
afford to neglect; for to pass by youth for maturity is 
sooner or later to lose step with life. 

In recent decades the novel especially, but also 
poetry, has drifted toward biography and autobiog- 
raphy. The older poets, who yesterday were the 
younger poets, such men as Masters, Robinson, Frost, 
Lindsay, have passed from lyric to biographic narra- 
tive; the younger poets more and more write of them- 
selves. In the novel the trend is even more marked. 
An acute critic, Mr. Wilson Follett, has recently noted 
that the novel of class or social consciousness, which 
only ten years ago those who teach literature were dis- 

149 



1^0 The New Generation 

cussing as the latest of late developments, has already- 
given way to a vigorous rival. It has yielded room, if 
not given place, to the novel of the discontented per- 
son. The young men, and in a less degree the young 
women, especially in America, where the youngest gen- 
eration is, I believe, more vigorous than elsewhere, 
have taken to biographical fiction. Furthermore, what 
began as biography, usually of a youth trying to dis- 
cover how to plan his career, has drifted more and more 
toward autobiography — an autobiography of discon- 
tent. 

There is, of course, nothing particularly new about 
biographical fiction. There is nothing generically new 
about the particular kind of demi-autobiographies that 
the advanced are writing just now. The last two dec- 
ades have been rich in stories that need only a set of 
notes to reveal their approximate faithfulness to things 
that actually happened. But there is an emphasis upon 
revolt and disillusion and confusion in these latest nov- 
els that is new. They are no longer on the defensive, 
no longer stories of boys struggling to adapt themselves 
to a difficult world (men of forty-odd still write such 
stories) ; their authors are on the offensive, and with a 
reckless desire to accomplish their objectives, they 
shower us with such a profusion of detail, desert the 
paths of use and wont in fiction so freely, and so often 
disregard the comfort, not to speak of the niceties, of 
the reader, that "the young realists" has seemed a fair, 
although, as I think, a misleading title, for their au- 
thors. To a critic they are most interesting, for the 



The Young Romantics 15 1 

novel of the alleged young realist is like a fresh country 
boy on a football field, powerful, promising, and utterly 
wasteful of its strength. 

Recent American literature has been especially rich 
in such novels. There was, for example, Fitzgerald's 
ragged, but brilliant, "This Side of Paradise,^' which 
conducted aimless and expansive youth from childhood 
through college. There was the much more impressive 
"Main Street," biographic in form, but with teeth set 
on edge in revolt. There was the vivid and ill-con- 
trolled sex novel "Erik Dorn,'' and Evelyn Scott's "The 
Narrow House," in which the miseries of a young girl 
caught in the squalid and the commonplace had their 
airing. There was Stephen Benet's "The Beginning of 
Wisdom," where the revolt was a poet's, and the real- 
ist's detail selected from beauty instead of from ugli- 
ness; and Aikman's "Zell," in which youth rubs its sore 
shoulders against city blocks instead of university 
quadrangles. There was Dos Passos's "Three Soldiers," 
in which the boy hero is crushed by the war machine 
his elders have made. These are type examples, pos- 
sibly not the best, certainly not the worst, drawn from 
the workshops of the so-called young realists. 

What is the biography of this modern youth? His 
father, in the romantic 'nineties, usually conquered the 
life of his elders, seldom complained of it, never spurned 
it. His son-in-the-novel is born into a world of intense 
sensation, usually disagreeable. Instead of a "Peter 
Ibbetson" boyhood, he encounters disillusion after dis- 
illusion. At the age of seven or thereabout he sees 



152 The New. Generation 

through his parents and characterizes them in a phrase. 
At fourteen he sees through his education and begins 
to dodge it. At eighteen he sees through morahty and 
steps over it. At twenty he loses respect for his home 
town, and at twenty-one discovers that our social and 
economic system is ridiculous. At twenty-three his 
story ends because the author has run through society 
to date and does not know what to do next. Life is 
ahead of the hero, and presumably a new society of 
his own making. This latter, however, does not ap- 
pear in any of the books, and for good reasons. 

In brief, this literature of the youngest generation is 
a literature of revolt, which is not surprising, but also 
a literature characterized by a minute and painful ex- 
amination of environment. Youth, in the old days, 
when it rebelled, escaped to romantic climes or ad- 
venturous experience from a world which some one else 
had made for it. That is what the hacks of the movies 
and the grown-up children who write certain kinds of 
novels are still doing. But true youth is giving us this 
absorbed examination of all possible experiences that 
can come to a boy or girl who does not escape from 
every-day life, this unflattering picture of a world that 
does not fit, worked out with as much evidence as if 
each novel were to be part of a brief of youth against 
society. Indeed, the implied argument is often more 
important than the story, when there is a story. And 
the argument consists chiefly of 'HMs happened to me," 
"I saw this and did not like it," "I was driven to this 
or that/^ until the mass of circumstantial incident and 



The Young Romantics 153 

sensation reminds one of the works of Zola and the 
scientific naturalists who half a century ago tried to 
put society as an organism into fiction and art. 

No better example has been given us than Dos 
Passos's "Three Soldiers," a book that would be tire- 
some (and is tiresome to many) in its night after night 
and day after day crammed with every possible un- 
pleasant sensation and experience that three young 
men could have had in the A. E. F. And that the ex- 
periences recorded were unpleasant ones, forced upon 
youth, not chosen by its will, is thoroughly characteris- 
tic. If it had not been for the rebellious pacifism in 
this book, it is questionable whether readers who had 
not been in France, and so could not relish the vivid 
reality of the descriptions, would have read to the 
end of the story. 

The cause of all this is interesting, more interesting 
than some of the results. The full result we can 
scarcely judge yet, for despite signs of pov^^er and 
beauty and originality, only one or two of these books 
have reached artistic maturity; but we can prepare to 
comprehend it. 

Here, roughly, is what I believe has happened, and 
if I confine my conclusions to fiction, it is not because 
I fail to realize that the effects are and will be far 
broader. 

The youths of our epoch were born and grew up in 
a period of criticism and disintegration. They were 
children when the attack upon orthodox conceptions of 
society succeeded the attack upon orthodox conceptions 



154 ^^^ New Generation 

of religion. We know how ''the conflict between re- 
ligion and science^' reverberated in nineteenth-century 
literature and shaped its ends. The new attack was 
quite different. Instead of scrutinizing a set of beliefs, 
it scrutinized a method of living. Insensibly, the in- 
telligent youth became aware that the distribution of 
wealth and the means of getting it were under attack; 
that questions were raised as to the rights of property 
and the causes and necessity of war. Soon moral con- 
cepts began to be shaken. He learned that prostitu- 
tion might be regarded as an economic evil. He found 
that sex morality was regarded by some as a useful 
taboo; psychology taught him that repression could be 
as harmful as excess; the collapse of the Darwinian 
optimists, who believed that all curves were upward, 
left him with the inner conviction that everything, in- 
cluding principle, was in a state of flux. And his in- 
tellectual guides, first Shaw, and then, when Shaw be- 
came vieux jeu, De Gourmont, favored that conclusion. 

Then came the war, which at a stroke destroyed his 
sense of security and with that his respect for the 
older generation that had guaranteed his world. Propa- 
ganda first enlightened him as to the evil meanings of 
imperialistic politics, and afterward left him suspicious 
of all politics. Cruelty and violent change became 
familiar. He had seen civilization disintegrate on the 
battlefield, and was prepared to find it shaky at home. 

Then he resumed, or began, his reading and his writ- 
ing. His reading of fiction and poetry, especially when 
it dealt with youth, irritated him. The pictures of 



The Young Romantics 155 

life in Dickens, in ^^The Idylls of the King," in the 
Henty books, in the popular romantic novels and the 
conventional social studies, did not correspond with his 
pictures. They in no sense corresponded with the de- 
scriptions of society given by the new social thinkers 
whose ideas had leaked through to him. They did 
not square with his own experience. "The Charge of 
the Light Brigade" rang false to a member of the 26th 
Division. Quiet stories of idyllic youth in New Eng- 
land towns jarred upon the memories of a class-con- 
scious youngster in modern New York. Youth began 
to scrutinize its own past, and then to write, with a 
passionate desire to tell the real truth, all of it, pleas- 
ant, unpleasant, or dirty, regardless of narrative 
relevance. 

The result was this new naturalism, a propaganda 
of the experience of youth, where the fact that mother's 
face was ugly, not angelic, is supremely important, more 
important than the story, just because it was the truth. 
And as the surest way to get all the truth is to tell your 
own story, every potential novelist wrote his own story, 
enriching it, where sensation was thin, from the biog- 
raphies of his intimates. Rousseau was reborn with- 
out his social philosophy. Defoe was reincarnated, 
but more anxious now to describe precisely what hap- 
pened to him than to tell an effective tale. 

This is a very different kind of truth-telling from, 
let us say, Mrs. Wharton's in "The Age of Innocence" 
or Zona Gale's in "Miss Lulu Bett." It does not spring 
from a desire to tell the truth about human nature. 



1^6 The New Generation 

These asserters of youth are not much interested in 
any human nature except their own, not much, indeed, 
in that, but only in the friction between their ego and 
the world. It is passionate truth, which is very dif- 
ferent from cool truth; it is subjective, not objective; 
romantic, not classical, to use the old terms which few 
nowadays except Professor Babbitt's readers under- 
stand. Nor is it the truth that Wells, let us say, or, to 
use a greater name, Tolstoy was seeking. It is not 
didactic or even interpretative, but only the truth about 
the difference between the world as it is and the world 
as it was expected to be; an impressionistic truth; in 
fact, the truth about my experiences, which is very 
different from what I may sometime think to be the 
truth about mankind. 

It will be strange if nothing very good comes from 
this impulse, for the purpose to "tell the world" that 
my vision of America is startlingly different from what 
I have read about America is identical with that break 
with the past which has again and again been prelude 
to a new era. I do not wish to discuss the alleged new 
era. Like the younger generation, it has been dis- 
cussed too much and is becoming evidently self-con- 
scious. But if the autobiographical novel js to be re- 
garded as its literary herald (and they are all prophetic 
Declarations of Independence), then we may ask what 
has the new generation given us so far in the way of 
literary art. 

Apparently the novel and the short story, as we have 
known them, are to be scrapped. Plot, which began to 



H 



The Young Romantics 157 

break down with the Russians, has crumbled into a 
maze of incident. You can no longer assume that the 
hero's encounter with a Gipsy in Chapter II is prep- 
aration for a tragedy in Chapter XXIX. In all prob- 
ability the Gipsy will never be heard from again. She 
is irrelevant except as a figment in the author's mem- 
ory, as an incident in autobiography. Setting, the old 
familiar background, put on the story like wall-paper 
on a living-room, has suffered a sea change also. It 
comes now by flashes, like a movie-film. What the 
ego remembers, that it describes, whether the drip of 
a faucet or the pimple on the face of a traffic police- 
man. As for character, there is usually but one, the 
hero; for the others live only as he sees them, and fade 
out when he looks away. If he is highly sexed, like 
Erik Dorn, the other figures appear in terms of sex, 
just as certain rays of light will bring out only one 
color in the objects they shine against. 

The novel, in fact, has melted and run down into a 
diary, with sometimes no unity except the personality 
whose sensations are recorded. Many of us have 
wished to see the conventional story forms broken to 
bits. It was getting so that the first sentence of a 
short story or the first chapter of a novel gave the 
whole show away. We welcomed the English stories 
of a decade ago that began to give the complexities of 
life instead of the conventions of a plot. But this com- 
plete liquidation rather appals us. 

The novels I have mentioned so far in this article 
have all together not enough plot to set up one lively 



158 The New Generation 

Victorian novel. Benet, Dos Passos, Fitzgerald — the 
flood-gates of each mind have been opened, and all that 
the years had dammed up bursts forth in a deluge of 
waters, carrying flotsam and jetsam and good things 
and mud. 

It is not surprising that, having given up plot, these 
writers escape from other restraints also. The more 
energetic among them revel in expression, and it seems 
to make little difference whether it is the exquisite 
chiaroscuro of Chicago they are describing, or spots 
on a greasy apron. The less enthusiastic are content 
to be as full of gritty realistic facts as a fig of seeds; 
but witli all of them everything from end to beginning, 
from bottom to top, must be said. 

And just here lies the explanation of the whole mat- 
ter. As one considers the excessive naturalism of the 
young realists and asks just why they find it neces- 
sary to be so excessively, so effusively realistic, the con- 
viction is inborn that they are not realists at all as 
Hardy, Ho wells, even James were realists; they are 
romanticists of a deep, if not the deepest, dye, even 
the heartiest lover of sordid incident among them all. 

I am aware, of course, that "romantic" is a dan- 
gerous word, more overworked than any other in the 
vocabulary of criticism, and very difficult to define. 
But in contrast with its opposites it can be made to 
mean something definite. Now, the romanticism of the 
juniors is not the opposite of realism; it sometimes em- 
braces realism too lovingly for the reader's comfort. 
But it is the opposite of classicism. It is emotional ex- 



The Young Romantics 159 

pansiveness as contrasted with the classic doctrine of 
measure and restraint. By this, the older meaning of 
romanticism, we may put a tag upon the new men that 
will help to identify them. Their desire is to free their 
souls from the restraints of circumstance, to break 
through rule and convention, to let their hearts expand. 

But they do not fly into Byronic melancholy or 
Wordsworthian enthusiasm for the mysterious ab- 
stract; they are far more likely to fly away from them. 
Byron and Wordsworth do not interest them, and 
Tennyson they hate. Romantic in mood, they are 
realistic, never classical, in their contact with experi- 
ence. In poetry they prefer free verse, in prose they 
eschew grand phrases and sonorous words. It has 
been the hard realism of an unfriendly world that has 
scraped them to the raw, and they retaliate by vividly 
describing all the unpleasant things they remember. 
Taught by the social philosophers and war's disillusions 
that Denmark is decaying, they do not escape to Cathay 
or Bohemia, but stay at home and passionately narrate 
what Denmark has done to them. Romantic Zolas, 
they have stolen the weapons of realism to fight the 
battle of their ego. And the fact that a few pause in 
their naturalism to soar into idyllic description or the 
rapture of beauty merely proves my point, that they 
are fundamentally romantics seeking escape, and that 
autobiographical realism is merely romanticism a la 
mode. 

Let us criticize it as such, remembering that we may 
be reading the first characteristic work of a new hter- 



i6o The New Generation 

ary era. Let us give over being shocked. Those who 
were shocked by Byron, the apostle of expansiveness, 
merely encouraged him to be more shocking. Nor is it 
any use to sit upon the hydrant of this new expansive- 
ness. If a youth desires to tell the world what has 
happened to him, he must be allowed to do so, pro- 
vided he has skill and power enough to make us listen. 
And these juniors have power even when skill has not 
yet been granted them. What is needed is a hose to 
stop the waste of literary energy, to conserve and direct 
it. Call for a hose, then, as much as you please, but 
do not try to stop the waters with your Moses's rod 
of conservative indignation. 

It is no crime to be a romantic, — it is a virtue, if 
that is the impulse of the age, — ^but it is a shame to be 
a wasteful romantic. Waste has always been the ro- 
mantic vice^ — waste of emotion, waste of words, the 
waste that comes from easy profusion of sentiment and 
the formlessness that permits it. Think of "The Ex- 
cursion," of Sou they, and of the early poems of Shelley, 
of Scott at his wordiest. And these writers also are 
wasteful, in proportion to their strength. 

They waste especially their imagination. Books like 
"The Three Soldiers" spill over in all directions — spill 
into poetry, philosophy, into endless conversation, and 
into everything describable. Books like "The Begin- 
ning of Wisdom" are still more wasteful. Here is the 
poignant biography of a boy who loves his environment 
even when it slays him, plus a collection ol prose idylls, 



The Young Romantics i6i 

plus a group of poems, plus a good piece of special re- 
porting, plus an assortment of brilliant letters; and 
imbedded in the mass, like a thread of gold in a tangle 
of yarn, as fresh and exquisite a love-story as we have 
had in recent English. Of course I do not mean that 
all these elements cannot be woven into, made relevant 
to, a theme, a story. Stendhal, himself a romantic, as 
these men are romantics, could do it. But our ro- 
mantics do not so weave them; they fling them out as 
contributions to life's evidence, they fail to relate them 
to a single interpretation of living, and half of the best 
incidents are waste, and clog the slow-rolling wheels 
of the story. 

They waste their energy also. So keenly do they 
love their own conception of true living that their im- 
aginations dwell with a kind of horrid fascination upon 
the ugly things that thwart them. Hence in a novel 
like "Main Street," the interest slackens as one begins 
to feel that the very vividness of the story comes from 
a vision strained and aslant, unable to tear eyes from 
the things that have cramped life instead of expanding 
it. The things that these writers love in life often they 
never reach until the last chapter, and about them 
they have little to say, being exhausted by earlier 
virulence. 

Waste, of course, is a symptom of youth and vitahty 
as well as of unbridled romanticism, but that is no 
reason for praising a book because it is disorderly. 
We do not praise young, vigorous states for being dis- 
orderly. Life may not be orderly, but literature must 



1 62 The New Generation 

be. That is a platitude which it seems necessary to 
repeat. 

It is difficult to estimate absolute achievement ex- 
cept across time, and the time has been too brief to 
judge of the merits of the young romanticists. My 
guess is that some of them will go far. But the diag- 
nosis at present seems to show an inflammation of the 
ego. The new generation is discovering its soul by the 
pain of its bruises, as a baby is made aware of its body 
by pin-pricks and chafes. It is explaining its dissatis- 
factions with more violence than art. 

Therefore at present the satirists and the educators 
hold the best cards, and most of them are elderly. No 
one of les jeunes writes with the skill, with the art, of 
Mrs. Wharton, Miss Sinclair, Tarkington, Galsworthy, 
or Wells. It should not long be so in a creative genera- 
tion. In sheer emotion, in vivid protest that is not 
merely didactic, the advantage is all with the young- 
sters. But they waste it. They have learned to criti- 
cize their elders, but not themselves. They have boy- 
cotted the books of writers who were young just be- 
fore themselves, but they have not learned to put a 
curb on their own expansiveness. We readers suffer. 
We do not appreciate their talents as we might, because 
we lose our bearings in hectic words or undigested in- 
cident. We lose by the slow realization of their art. 

Youth is a disease that cures itself, though some- 
times too late. The criticism I have made, in so far 
as it refers to youthful impetuosity, is merely the sort 
of thing that has to be said to every generation, and 



The Young Romantics 163 

very loudly to the romantic ones. But if these auto- 
biographians are, as I believe, expansive romanticists, 
that is of deeper significance, and my hope is that the 
definition may prove useful to them as well as to readers 
who with an amazed affection persist in following them 
wherever they lead. 



Puritans All 

When anything goes wrong in politics the American 
practice is to charge it against the Administration. In 
literature all grievances are attributed to the Puritans. 
If a well-written book does not sell, it is because the 
Puritans warped our sense of beauty; if an honest dis- 
cussion of sex is attacked for indecency, it is the fault 
of the Puritan inheritance; if the heroes and heroines 
of new narratives in prose or verse jazz their way to 
destruction or impotence, it is in protest against the 
Puritans. 

Who is this terrible Puritan? Apparetitly he is all 
America's ancestor, and whether you were born in Dela- 
ware or in South Carolina, in Montana or in Jugoslavia, 
you must adopt him as great-great-grandfather or 
declare yourself alien. 

What was he, or rather, what did he stand for, and 
inflict upon us, to-day? Here there is some confusion. 
According to one set of critics he is not so much a 
hater of the arts as indifferent to their charms, not so 
much a Milton scornful of easy beauty, as a Philistine, 
deaf and blind to the esthetic. But these writers have 
apparently confounded Great-great-grandfather Puri- 
tan with Grandpa Victorian, the Victorian that Mat- 
thew Arnold scolded and Shaw made fun of. He is a 
type as different from the real Puritan as the slum 

164 



Puritans All 165 

dweller from the primitive barbarian. "Milton, thou 
shouldst be living at this hour" to flay such ignorant 
traducers of those who knew at least the beauty of 
austerity and holiness. 

According to a less numerous but more clear-headed 
group of enemies the Puritan is to be censured chiefly 
for the rigidity of his conscience. He will not let us 
enjoy such "natural" pleasures as mirth, love, drink- 
ing, and idleness without a bitter antidote of remorse. 
He keeps books dull and reticent, makes plays virtu- 
ously didactic, and irritates all but the meek and the 
godly into revolt. 

I am not an uncritical admirer of the Puritan, 
although I believe he is more nearly on the side of the 
angels than is his opposite. I deprecate the smug vir- 
tuosity which his kind often favor, I dislike a vinegar 
morality, and am repelled by the monstrous egoism of 
the idea that redeeming one^s soul is such a serious 
matter that every moment spared from contemplating 
the sins of others or the pieties of oneself is irretrievably 
wasted. 

But I object still more strongly to the anti-Puritans. 
Those rebels who make unconventionality their only 
convention, with their distrust of duty because they 
see no reason to be dutiful, and their philosophic nihil- 
ism, which comes to this, that all things having been 
proved false except their own desires, their desires be- 
come a philosophy, those anti-Puritans, as one sees 
them, especially in plays and on the stage, are an ob- 
streperous, denying folk that seldom know their own 



1 66 The New Generation 

minds to the end of the story. In fiction, distrusting 
what the Puritans call duty, they are left gasping 
in the last chapter, wondering usually what they are 
to do next; while the delightful lack of conscience that 
makes the flappers audacious and the young men so 
unremorsefully naughty leads to nothing at the end 
but a passionate desire to discover some new reason 
for living (which I take to mean, a new conscience) 
even if homes and social utility are wrecked in the 
attempt. 

Why has duty become so unpopular in American 
literature? Is it because she is, after all, just what 
that loftiest if not most impeccable of Puritans called 
her, stern daughter of the voice of God? Is there 
to be no more sternness in our morals now we under- 
stand their psychology, no voice commanding us to 
do this or not to do that because there is a gulf set be- 
tween worth and worthlessness? Is it true that be- 
cause we are not to be damned for playing golf on Sun- 
day, nothing can damn us? That because the rock- 
ribbed Vermont ancestor's idea of duty can never be 
ours, we have no duty to acknowledge? Is it true that 
if we cease being Puritans we can remain without prin- 
ciple, swayed only by impulse and events? 

When these questions are answered to the hilt, we 
shall get something more vital than anti-Puritanism in 
modern American literature. 



The Older Generation 

The American Academy of Arts and Letters says a 
word for the Older Generation now and then by choos- 
ing new academicians from its ranks. No one else for 
a long while now has been so poor as to do it reverence. 
Indeed, the readers of some of our magazines must 
have long since concluded that there are no fathers 
and mothers in the modern literary world, but only self- 
created heralds of the future who do not bother even 
to be rebellious against a generation they condemn. 

The older generation is in a difficult situation, be- 
cause, apparently, no one knows precisely who and 
what it is. The younger generation, of course, is made 
up of every one who dislikes Tennyson, believes in 
realism, reads De Gourmont, and was not responsible 
for the war. That is perfectly definite. We are some- 
what puzzled by the uncounted hordes of the youthful 
in appearance who support the movies, are stolidly con- 
servative in the colleges, never heard of De Gourmont, 
and have forgotten the war. But perhaps that is some 
other younger generation which no one has taken the 
trouble to write about — yet. 

As for the older generation, what actually is it, and 
who in reality are they? The general impression seems 
to be that they are the Victorians, they are Howells 
and his contemporaries, they are the men and women 

167 



1 68 The New. Generation 

who created the family magazine, invented morality, 
revived Puritanism, and tried to impose evolution on a 
society that preferred devolution by international com- 
bat. But these men are all dead, or have ceased writ- 
ing. They are not our older generation. It is true 
that they are famous and so convenient for reference, 
but it is not accurate nor fair to drag them from their 
graves for purposes of argument. 

The true older generation, of which one seldom hears 
in current criticism except in terms of abuse, remains 
to be discovered, and we herewith announce its person- 
nel, so that the next time the youthful writer excoriates 
it in the abstract all may know just whom he means. 
Among the older generation in American literature are 
H. L. Mencken and Mrs. Edith Wharton, Booth Tark- 
ington and Stuart P. Sherman, Miss Amy Lowell and 
Mr. Frank Moore Colby, Robert Frost and Edwin 
Arlington Robinson, Vachel Lindsay and Carl Sand- 
burg, Mrs. Gerould and Professor William Lyon Phelps, 
Edgar Lee Masters, Joseph Hergesheimer, and most of 
the more radical editors of New York. Here is this 
group of desiccated Victorians, upholders of the ethics 
of Mr. Pickwick, and the artistic theories of Bulwer- 
Lytton. Here are the bogies of outworn conservatism, 
numbered like a football team. Mark their names, and 
know from now on that most of the books that you have 
supposed were solid in artistry and mature in thought, 
though perhaps novel in tone or in method, were writ- 
ten by the older generation. 

Perhaps when the younger generation pretend to con- 



The Older Generation 169 

fuse their immediate predecessors with Ruskin and 
Carlyle, with Browning, Emerson, Hawthorne, Long- 
fellow, and Matthew Arnold, they are merely strategic. 
For it is still dangerous to assault the citadels of the 
great Victorians with no greater books than the youth- 
ful volumes of 1918-1921, no matter how many 
breaches the war has left in the walls of their philoso- 
phy. It is far easier to assume that they are still alive 
in pallid survival, and to attack a hypothetic older gen- 
eration, which, representing nothing real, can there- 
fore not strike back. 

Let the younger generation go back to its muttons, 
let it attend to its most pressing business, which is to 
create. It is vigorous, prolific, and, to my judgment, 
full of promise, but so far has done little or nothing 
not summarized in these words. It must pay its debt 
to time before it grows much older, or go down among 
expectations unrealized. It has few hours to waste 
upon attacking an older generation which, as it is de- 
scribed, does not exist except in youthful imagination, 
a generation actually of the middle-aged which in the 
meantime is bearing the burden of invention, creation, 
revolution in art while the youngsters are talking. 

I should like to see less about the younger and more 
of this older generation in literary criticism. It is a 
fresh subject, scarcely touched by writers, and full of 
surprises. The jaded reader should be told that, in 
spite of rumors to the contrary, the middle-aged still 
exist. 



A Literature of Protest 

I HAVE pursued the discussions of the new American 
realism through university gatherings and literary in- 
quests. Stripped of all metaphysics and relieved of 
all subtlety the conclusion of the matter is inescapable. 
It is not the realism of the realists, or the freedom of 
free verse, or the radicalism of the radical that in it- 
self offends the critics, it is the growing ugliness of 
American literature. The harsh and often vulgar lines 
of Masters (so they say) seem to disdain beauty. 
Vachel Lindsay's shouted raptures are raucous. Miss 
Lowell's polyphonies have intellectual beauty, but the 
note is sharp, the splendors pyrotechnic. Robert 
Frost's restrained rhythms are homely in the single 
line. The "advanced" novelists, who win the prizes 
and stir up talk, are fiat in style when not muddy in 
their English. They do not lift. An eighteenth cen- 
tury critic would call American literature ugly, or at 
least homely, if he dipped into its realities, rococo if 
he did not. 

This is the sum of a criticism so strongly felt that 
it raises a barrier to appreciation, almost a gate shut 
against knowledge between the good American readers 
and the progressives in our literature. Sandburg and 
Lindsay between them will cause more acrimony in a 
gathering of English teachers than even Harold Bell 

170 



A Literature of Protest lyv 

Wright. Miss Lowell carries controversy with her, 
triumphantly riding upon it. Their critics wish form 
as they have known form, want beauty such as they 
possess in riper literatures, want maturity, richness, 
suavity, grace, and the lift of noble thinking, nobly ex- 
pressed. It may be remarked, in passing, that they 
also would like to live in English manors in gardened 
landscapes and have French cathedrals rise above their 
perfect towns! 

It ought to be clear that we shall never get beauty 
of this kind, or of any absolute kind, in American writ- 
ing until there is more beauty in American life. Amidst 
the vulgarities of signboards, cries of cheap newspapers, 
noisy hustle of trivial commercialism, and the flatness 
of standardized living, it is hard to feel spiritual quali- 
ties higher than optimism and reform. In general, 
wherever we have touched America we have made it 
uglier, as a necessary preliminary perhaps to making 
it anything at all, but uglier nevertheless. There was 
more hardship perhaps but also more clear beauty in 
Colonial days than in our own. More clear beauty, we 
say, because the present has its own vigorous beauty, 
more complex than what went before, but not yet clari- 
fied from the ugly elements that are making it. The 
forests and the skyscrapers are beautiful in America, 
but pretty much everything else below and between is 
soiled or broken by progress and prosperity. 

And it is of the things in between, of America in the 
making, that these new writers, whose lack of pure 
beauty we deplore, and whose occasional gratuitous 



172 The New. Generation 

ugliness we dislike, are writing. They are protesting 
against its sordidness and crudity far more effectively 
than the cloistered reader who recites Shelley, saying 
"Why can't they write as he does." Like all that is 
human they share the qualities of their environment, 
like all fighters they acquire the faults of the enemy. 
They hate, often enough, the ugliness which a genera- 
tion of progress has implanted in their own minds. 
They have been educated, perhaps, by the movies, 
Main Street conversation, formalized schools, and stale 
Methodism, and they hate their education. Or like 
the poets mentioned above they are moved by the 
pathos, the injustice, the confused beauty, the promise, 
not of some land of the past, but of the country under 
their feet, and write of what stirs them in terms that fit. 

It is only when one understands this new Ameri- 
can writing to be a literature of protest, that one be- 
gins to sympathize with its purposes, admire its achieve- 
ments, and be tolerant of its limitations. For such a 
literature has very definite limitations. It is prepara- 
tive rather than ultimate. The spaciousness of great 
imagination is seldom in it, and it lacks those grand 
and simple conceptions which generalize upon the 
human race. It is cluttered with descriptions of the 
enemy, it is nervous, or morbid, or excited, or over- 
emphatic. That it strikes out occasional sparks of 
vivid beauty, and has already produced masterpieces 
in poetry, is to be wondered at and praised. 

But some one had to begin to write of the United 
States as it is. We could not go on with sentimental 



A Literature of Protest 173 

novels and spineless lyrics forever. Some writers had 
to refocus the instrument and look at reality again. 
And what the honest saw was not beautiful as Tenny- 
son knew beauty, not grand, not even very pleasant. It 
is their job to make beauty out of it, beauty of a new 
kind probably, because it will accompany new truth; 
but they must have time. Surprise, shock, experiment, 
come first. The new literature deserves criticism, 
but it also deserves respect. Contempt for it is mis- 
placed, aversion is dangerous since it leads to ignorance, 
wholesale condemnation such as one hears from pro- 
fessional platforms and reads in newspaper editorials 
is as futile as the undiscriminating praise of those 
who welcome novelty just because it is new. 



Barbarians a la Mode 

The liberal mind, which just now is out of a job in 
politics, might very well have a look at the present state 
of literature. A task is there ready for it. 

Our literature is being stretched and twisted or 
hacked and hewed by dogmatists. Most of the critics 
are too busy gossiping about plots and the private lives 
of authors to devote much attention to principles. But 
the noble few who still can write about a book without 
falling into it, or criticize an author's style without 
dragging in his taste in summer resorts, are chiefly con- 
cerned with classifications. Is our author conservative 
or radical? Are his novels long or short skirted? Does 
he write for Uarpefs or The Dial? They have divided 
America chronologically into the old and the new and 
geographically into East or West of the Alleghanies, 
or North or South of Fourteenth Street in New York. 
Such creative writers as have a definite philosophy of 
composition are equally categorical. And both are 
calling upon liberal minds, who are supposed to have 
no principles of their own, to umpire the controversy. 

The liberal mind, which I believe in, though I hesi- 
tate to define it, has too much work before it to umpire 
in a dispute over the relative taste of the decayed and 
the raw. In literature, as in pretty much everything 
else, the central problem is not the struggle of the old 

174 



Barbarians a la Mode 175 

with the new; it is the endless combat of civilization 
(which is old and new) against barbarism. Under 
which banner our writers are enlisting is the vital ques- 
tion. Whether they are radical or conservative will 
always in the view of history be interesting, but may be 
substantially unimportant. And the function of the 
liberal mind, with its known power to dissolve illiberal 
dogmatism, is to discover the barbarian wherever he 
raises his head, and to convert or destroy him. 

The Greeks had a short way of defining the barbarian 
which we can only envy. To them, all men not Greeks 
were barbarians. By this they meant that only the 
Greeks had learned to desire measure in all things, lib- 
erty safeguarded by law, and knowledge of the truth 
about life. Men not desiring these things were bar- 
barous, no matter how noble, how rich, and how honest. 
The ancient and highly conservative Egyptians were 
barbarous; the youthful and new-fangled Gauls were 
barbarous. An Egyptian in nothing else resembled a 
Gaul, but both in the eyes of the Greek were barbarians. 

Evolution and devolution have intervened. The 
Gaul has become one of the standards of civilization; 
the Egyptian has died of his conservatism; but the 
problem of the barbarian remains the same. There 
are neo-Gauls to-day and neo-Egyptians. 

These gentry do not belong to the welter of vulgar 
barbarism, the curse of a half educated, half democra- 
tized age. They are found among the upper classes 
of the intellect, and can rightly be called by such 
names as conservative or radical, which show that they 



176 The New Generation 

are part of the minority that thinks. Indeed, they are 
not barbarous at all in the harsh modern sense of the 
word; yet the Greeks would have condemned them. 

The barbarism of the neo-Gaul is unrestraint 
("punch" is the nearest modern equivalent). The neo- 
Gaul is an innovator and this is his vice. It is a by- 
product of originality and a symptom of a restless 
desire for change. The realist who makes a poem, 
not on his lady's eyebrows but her intestines, is a 
good current example. The novelist who shovels un- 
distinguished humanity, just because it is human, into 
his book is another. The versifier who twists and 
breaks his rhythm solely in order to get new sounds is 
a third. A fourth is the stylist who writes in disjointed 
phrases and expletives, intended to represent the actual 
processes of the mind. 

The realist poet, so the Greeks would have said, 
lacks measure. He destroys the balance of his art 
by asking your attention for the strangeness of his 
subject. It is as if a sculptor should make a Venus 
of chewing gum. The novelist lacks self-restraint. 
Life interests him so much that he devours without 
digesting it. The result is like a moving picture run 
too fast. The versifier also lacks measure. He is more 
anxious to be new than to be true, and he seeks effects 
upon the reader rather than forms for his thought. 
The bizarre stylist misses truth by straining too much 
to achieve it. Words are only symbols. They never 
more than roughly represent a picture of thought. A 
monologue like this, as the heroine goes to shop: 



Barbarians a la Mode 177 

Chapel Street . . . the old hardware shop . . . scissors, 
skates glittering, moonlight on the ice . . . old Dr. Brown's 
head, like a rink. Rink ... a queer word! Pigeons in the 
air above the housetops — automobiles like elephants. Was 
her nose properly powdered? . . . Had she cared to dance 
with him after all? 

is not absolutely true: it is not the wordless images 
that float through the idle mind, but only a symbol 
of them, m.ore awkward and less informative than the 
plain English of what the heroine felt and thought. 

All these instances are barbarous in the Greek sense, 
and their perpetrators, no matter how cultivated, how 
well-meaning, how useful sometimes as pioneers and 
pathbreakers, are barbarians. Some of them should 
be exposed; some chided; some labored with, accord- 
ing to the magnitude and the nature of their offense. 
The critics who uphold and approve them should be 
dealt with likewise. And it is the reader with the 
liberal mind who is called to the task. He is in sym- 
pathy, at least, with change, and knows that the 
history of civilization has been a struggle to break 
away from tradition and yet not go empty-handed; 
he can understand the passion to express old things 
in a new and better way, or he is not intellectually 
liberal. It takes a liberal mind to distinguish between 
barbarism and progress. 

Next there is the rigor mortis of the neo-Egyptians, 
the barbarism of the dead hand, called by the unkind 
and the undiscriminating, academic barbarism. 

Let us humor the Menckenites by so calling it, and 



178 The New Generation 

then add that it is by no means confined to the colleges, 
although it is a vice more familiar in critics than in 
creative artists. A Ph.D. is quite unnecessary in order 
to be academic in this sense, just as one does not have 
to be a scholar in order to be pedantical. To stand 
pat in one's thinking (and this is the neo-Egyptian 
fault) is to be barbarous, whatever the profession of 
the thinker. True, the victims of this hardening of 
the brain are precisely those men and women most 
likely to fling taunts at the moderns, just those who 
would rather be charged with immorality than bar- 
barism. And yet, to be bound to the past is as bar- 
barous in the Greek sense as to be wholly immersed 
in the present. The Eg3^tians for all their learning 
were barbarians. 

Barbarian is not as rude a word as it sounds. Most 
of the great romanticists had strains of the barbarous 
in them — the young Shakespeare among them. Indeed, 
much may be said for sound barbarian literature, until 
it becomes self-conscious, though not much for bar- 
barian criticism. Nevertheless, I do not intend in this 
sally against the slavish barbarism of the merely aca- 
demic mind to hurl the epithet recklessly. Lusty con- 
servatives who attack free verse, free fiction, ultra 
realism, "jazzed" prose, and the socialistic drama as 
the diseases of the period have my respect and sym- 
pathy, when it is a disease and not change as change 
that they are attacking. And, often enough, these 
manifestations are symptoms of disease, a plethoric 
disease arising from too high blood pressure. Hard- 



Barbarians a la Mode 179 

hitting conservatives were never more needed in litera- 
ture than now, when any one can print anything that 
is novel, and find some one to approve of it. But there 
are too many respectable barbarians among our Ameri- 
can conservatives who write just what they wrote 
twenty years ago, and like just what they liked twenty 
years ago, because that is their nature. In 1600 they 
would have done the same for 1579. Without question 
men were regretting in 1600 the genius of the youthful 
Shakespeare of the '8o's, later quenched by commer- 
cialism (see the appeals to the pit and the topical 
references in "Hamlet"); and good conservatives were 
certainly regretting the sad course of the drama which, 
torn from the scholars and flung to the mob, had be- 
come mad clowning. What we need in the Tory line 
is not such ice-bound derelicts but men who are pas- 
sionate about the past because they find their inspira- 
tion there, men and women who belabor the present 
not for its existence, but because it might have been 
better if it had been wiser. 

They must, in short, be Greeks, not barbarians. It 
is the reverse of barbarous to defend the old, but the 
man who can see no need, no good, no hope in change 
is a barbarian. He flinches from the truth physical 
and the truth spiritual that life is motion. I particu- 
larly refer to the literary person who sneers at novels 
because they are not epics, and condemns new poems 
or plays unread if they deal with a phase of human 
evolution that does not please him. I mean the critic 
who drags his victim back to Aristotle or Matthew 



i8o The New Generation 

Arnold and slays him on a text whose application 
Aristotle or Arnold would have been the first to deny. 
I mean the teacher who by ironic thrust and visible 
contempt destroys the faith of youth in the literary 
present without imparting more than a pallid interest 
in the past. I mean the essayist who in 191 1 described 
Masefield as an unsound and dangerous radical in 
verse, and in 192 1 accepts him as the standard "mod- 
ern" poet by whom his degenerate successors are to 
be measured. 

All this is barbarism because it is ignorance or denial 
of the laws of growth. It belongs anthropologically 
with totemism, sacerdotalism, neo-ritualism, and every 
other remnant of the terrible shackles of use and wont 
which chained, early man to his past. It is Egyptian. 
Its high priests are sometimes learned but their minds 
are frozen. Beware of them. 

In England, so far as I am able to judge, this variety 
of barbarism shows itself usually in a rather snobbish 
intolerance of anything not good form in literature. 
The universities still protect it, but its home is in 
London, among the professional middle class. 

In America its symptom is well-disguised fear. 
Some of us are afraid of our literary future just as 
many of us are afraid of democracy. Poetry and criti- 
cism (we feel) which used to be written by classicists 
and gentlemen are now in the hands of the corn-fed 
multitude, educated God knows how or where. Fic- 
tion, once a profession, has become a trade, and so 
has the drama. The line between journalism and litera- 



Barbarians a la Mode i8i 

ture is lost. Grub Street has become an emporium. 
Any one, anything can get into a story or a son- 
net. . . . 

The Greek of to-day (as we venture to define him) 
views all this with some regret, and more concern. 
He sees that fine traditions are withering, that fine 
things are being marred by ignorant handling. He 
fears debasement, he hates vulgarity, and his realist 
soul admits the high probability of both in a society 
whose standards are broader than they are high. But 
he also sees new energies let loose and new resources 
discovered; he recognizes new forms of expression, 
uncouth or colloquial perhaps, but capable of vitality 
and truth, and not without beauty. He bends his mind 
toward them, knowing that if he ignores them their 
authors will ignore him and his kind. 

The Egyptian is afraid. He pulls his mantle closer 
about him and walks by on the other side. 

Here again is work for the liberal mind. If it is 
really liberal — ^which means that training and disposi- 
tion have made it free to move through both the past 
and the present — it can cope with this Egyptian bar- 
barism; for liberal-minded lovers of literature, by per- 
forming a very simple operation in psychoanalysis, can 
understand how love for the good old times may cause 
fear lest we lose their fruits, and how fear blinds the 
critic's eye, makes his tongue harsh, and his judgment 
rigid as death. 

Liberalism in politics is sulking just now, like Achilles 
in his tent, its aid having been invited too early, or 



182 The New, Generation 

too late. But the liberal spirit can never rest, and 
we solicit its help in literature. I have mentioned the 
Gauls and the Egyptians as the enemies within the 
camp of the intellectual, but beyond them lie the un- 
counted numbers of the outer barbarians, the mass 
of the unillumined, to whom neither tradition nor re- 
volt, nor anything which moves and has its being in 
the intellect has any significance. Here is the common 
enemy of all, who can be conquered only by convert- 
ing him. When the Gaul and the Egyptian are liber- 
alized, the real job begins. 

"If we compose well here, to Parthia.'' 



IV 

The Reviewing of Books 



A Prospectus for Criticism 

Criticism, in one respect, is like science: there is 
pure science, so-called, and applied science; there is 
pure criticism and applied criticism, which latter is 
reviewing. In applied science, principles established 
elsewhere are put to work; in reviewing, critical prin- 
ciples are, or should be, put to work in the analysis 
of books, but the books, if they are really important, 
often make it necessary to erect new critical principles. 
In fact, it is impossible to set a line where criticism 
ceases and reviewing begins. Good criticism is gener- 
ally applicable to all literature; good reviewing is good 
criticism applied to a new book. I see no other valid 
distinction. 

Reviewing in America has had a career by no means 
glorious. In the early nineteenth century, at the time 
of our first considerable productivity in literature, it 
was sporadic. The great guns — Lowell, Emerson — 
fired critical broadsides into the past; only occasionally 
(as in "A Fable for Critics") were they drawn into 
discussions of their contemporaries, and then, as in the 
Emerson-Whitman affair, they sometimes regretted it. 
Reviewing was carried on in small type, in the backs 
of certain magazines. Most of it was verbose and much 
of it was worthless as criticism. The belated recogni- 
tion of the critical genius of Poe was due to the com- 

185 



1 86 The Reviewing of Books 

pany he kept. He was a sadly erratic reviewer, as 
often wrong, I suppose, as right, but the most durable 
literary criticism of the age came from his pen, and 
is to be found in a review, a review of Hawthorne's 
short stories. 

After the Civil War the situation did not imme- 
diately improve. We had perhaps better reviewing, 
certainly much better mediums of criticism, such, for 
example, as The Nation, and, later. The Critic, but 
not more really excellent criticism. The magazines 
and newspapers improved, the v/eekly, as a medium 
of reviewing, established itself, though it functioned 
imperfectly; the individuals of force and insight who 
broke through current comment into criticism were 
more plentiful, but not more eminent. 

The new era in reviewing, our era, began with two 
phenomena, of which the first had obscure beginnings 
and the second can be exactly dated. 

The first was modern journalism. Just when journal- 
ism became personal, racy, and inclusive of all the 
interests of modern life, I cannot say. Kipling exhibits 
its early effects upon literature, but Kipling was an 
effect, not a cause. No matter when it began, we have 
seen, in the decade or two behind us, reviewing made 
journalistic, an item of news, but still more a means 
of entertainment. 

The journalistic reviewer, who is still the commonest 
variety, had one great merit. He was usually interest- 
ing. Naturally so, since he wrote not to criticize the 



A Prospectus for Criticism 187 

book that had been given him, but to interest his 
readers. Yet by the very nature of the case he labored 
under a disadvantage which forever barred him from 
calHng himself critic as well as reviewer. He was a 
specialist in reporting, in making a story from the 
most unpromising material, and also in the use of his 
mother tongue, but a specialist, usually, in no other 
field whatsoever. Fiction, poetry, biography, science, 
history, politics, theology — whatever came to his mill 
was grist for the paper, and the less he knew of the 
subject and the less he had read and thought, the more 
emphatic, were his opinions. 

The club and saber work of Pope's day and Chris- 
topher North's has gone — advertising has m.ade it an 
expensive luxury, and here at least commercialism has 
been of service to literature. It was wholesale and 
emphatic praise that became a trademark of journal- 
istic reviewing. First novels, or obscure novels, were 
sometimes handled roughly by a reviewer whose duty 
was to prepare a smart piece of copy. But when books 
by the well known came to his desk it was safer to 
praise than to damn, because in damning one had to 
give reasons, whereas indiscriminate praise needed 
neither knowledge nor excuse. Furthermore, since the 
chief object was to have one's review read, excessive 
praise had every advantage over measured approval. 
Who would hesitate between two articles, one headed 
"The Best Book of the Year," and the other, "A New 
Novel Critically Considered"! 

Thus, journalism per se has done little for the cause 



1 88 The Reviewing of Books 

of American reviewing, and directly or indirectly it 
has done much harm, if only by encouraging publishers 
who found no competent discussions of their wares to 
set up their own critics, who poured out through the 
columns of an easy press commendations of the new 
books which were often most intelligent, but never 
unbiased. 

The newspapers, however, have rendered one great 
service to criticism. In spite of their attempts to make 
even the most serious books newsy news, they, and 
they alone, have kept pace with the growing swarm of 
published books. The literary supplement, which pro- 
posed to review all books not strictly technical or tran- 
sient, was a newspaper creation. And the literary sup- 
plement, which grew from the old book page, contained 
much reviewing which was in no bad sense journalistic. 
Without it the public would have had only the adver- 
tisements and the publishers' announcements to classify, 
analyze, and in some measure describe the regiment 
of books that marches in advance of our civilization. 

We were not to be dependent, however, upon the 
budding supplements and the clever, ignorant review- 
ing, which, in spite of notable exceptions, characterized 
the newspaper view of books. The technical critic 
of technical books had long been practising, and his 
ability increased with the advance in scholarship that 
marked the end of the nineteenth century. The prob- 
lem was how to make him write for the general in- 
telligent reader. For years the old Nation, under the 
editorship of Garrison and of Godkin, carried on this 



A Prospectus for Criticism 189 

struggle almost single-handed. For a generation it was 
the only American source from which an author might 
expect a competent review of a serious, non-technical 
book. But the weight of the endeavor was too much 
for it. Fiction it largely evaded, as the London Times 
Literary Supplement does to-day. And with all the 
serious books in English awaiting attention in a few 
pages of a single weekly, it is no wonder that the 
shelves of its editorial office held one of the best modern 
libraries in New York! Or that Christmas, 1887, was 
the time chosen to review a gift edition of 1886! The 
old Dial had a like struggle, and a resembling diffi- 
culty. 

It was in 19 14 that The New Republic applied a 
new solution to the problem, and from its pages and 
from the other "intellectual weeklies" which have 
joined it, has come not merely some of the best review- 
ing that we have had, but also a distinct lift upwards 
in the standard of our discussion of contemporary 
books of general interest. After 19 14 one could ex- 
pect to find American reviews of certain kinds of 
books which were as excellent as any criticisms from 
England or from France. 

But the solution applied was of such a character as 
to limit definitely its application. The New Republic, 
the present Nation, The Freeman, The Weekly Review, 
and, in a little different sense, The Dial, were founded 
by groups held together, with the exception of The 
Dial coterie, not by any common attitude towards lit- 
erature, or by any specific interest in literature itself, 



190 The Reviewing of Books 

but rather by a common social philosophy. These 
journals, again with the one exception, were devoted 
primarily to the application of their respective social 
philosophies. Even when in reviews or articles there 
was no direct social application, there was a clear irradi- 
ation from within. When The New Republic is hu- 
morous, it is a social-liberal humor. When The Free- 
man is ironic there is usually an indirect reference to 
the Single Tax. And The Dial will be modern or 
perish. 

As a result of all this the space given to books 
at large in the social-political journals was small. And 
in that space one could prophesy with some exactness 
the reviewing to be expected. Books of social philos- 
ophy, novels with a thesis, poetry of radical emotion, 
documented history, and the criticism of politics or 
economic theory have had such expert reviewing as 
America has never before provided in such quantity. 
But there was a certain monotony in the conclusions 
reached. "Advanced'' books had "advanced" reviewers 
who approved of the author's ideas even if they did 
not like his book. Conservative books were sure to 
be attacked in one paragraph even if they were praised 
in another. What was much more deplorable, good, 
old-fashioned books, that were neither conservative 
nor radical, but just human, had an excellent chance 
of interesting no one of these philosophical editors and 
so of never being reviewed at all. Irving, Cooper of 
the Leather stocking Series, possibly Hawthorne, and 
quite certainly the author of "Huckleberry Finn" 




A Prospectus for Criticism 191 

would have turned over pages for many a day without 
seeing their names at all. 

Thus the intellectual weekly gave us an upstand- 
ing^ competent criticism of books with ideas in them — 
when the ideas seemed important to the editors; a 
useful service, but not a comprehensive one; the criti- 
cism of a trend rather than a literature; of the products 
of a social group rather than the outspeaking of a 
nation. Something more was needed. 

Something more was needed; and specifically liter- 
ary mediums that should be catholic in criticism, com- 
prehensive in scope, sound, stimulating, and accurate. 

To be catholic in criticism does not mean to be weak 
and opinionless. A determination to discuss literature 
honestly and v^^ith insight, letting conclusions be what 
they must, may be regarded as a sufficient editorial 
stock in trade. It is fundamental, but it is not suffi- 
cient. Just as there is personality behind every gov- 
ernment, so there should be a definite set of personal 
convictions behind literary criticism, which is not a 
science, though science may aid it. Sterilized, dehu- 
manized criticism is almost a contradiction in terms, 
except in those rare cases where the weighing of evi- 
dential facts is all that is required. But these cases 
are most rare. Even a study of the text of Beowulf, 
or a history of Norman law, will be influenced by 
the personal emotions of the investigator, and must be 
so criticized. Men choose their philosophy according 
to their temperament; so do writers write; and so must 
critics criticize. Which is by no means to say that 



192 The Reviewing of Books 

criticism is merely an affair of temperament, but rather 
to assert that temperament must not be left out of 
account in conducting or interpreting criticism. 

Ideally, then, the editors of a catholic review should 
have definite convictions, if flexible minds, estabhshed 
principles, if a wide latitude of application. But al- 
though a review may thus be made catholic, it cannot 
thus attain comprehensiveness. There are too many 
books; too many branches upon the luxuriant tree of 
modern knowledge. No editorial group, no editorial 
staff, can survey the field competently unless they 
strictly delimit it by selection, and that means not to 
be comprehensive. Yet if the experts are to be called 
in, the good critics, the good scholars, the good sci- 
entists, until every book is reviewed by the writer 
best qualified to review it, then we must hope to attain 
truth by averages as the scientists do, rather than by 
dogmatic edict. For if it is difficult to guarantee in 
a few that sympathy with all earnest books which does 
not preclude rigid honesty in the application of firmly 
held principles, it is more difficult with the many. And 
if it is hard to exclude bias, inaccuracy, over-statement, 
and inadequacy from the work even of a small and 
chosen group, it is still harder to be certain of complete 
competence if the net is thrown more widely. 

In fact, there is no absolute insurance against bad 
criticism except the intelligence of the reader. He must 
discount where discount is necessary, he must weigh the 
authority of the reviewer, he must listen to the critic 



A Prospectus for Criticism 193 

as the protestant to his minister, willing to be in- 
structed, but aware of the fallibility of man. 

Hence, a journal of comprehensive criticism must 
first select its reviewers with the greatest care and 
then print vouchers for their opinions, which will be 
the names of the reviewers. Hence it must open its 
columns to rebuttals or qualifications, so that the 
reader may form his own conclusions as to the validity 
of the criticism, and, after he has read the book, judge 
its critics. 

All this is a world away from the anonymous, dog- 
matic reviewing of a century ago. But who shall say 
that in this respect our practice is retrograde? 

It is a great and sprawling country, this America, 
with all manner of men of all manners in it, and the 
days of patent medicines have passed, when one bottle 
was supposed to contain a universal cure. But in this 
matter of reading, which must be the chief concern 
of those who support a critical journal, there is one 
disease common to most of us that can be diagnosed 
with certainty, and one sure, though slow-working, rem- 
edy, that can be applied. We are uncritical readers. 
We like too readily, which is an amiable fault; we 
dislike too readily, which is a misfortune. We accept 
the cheap when we might have the costly book. We 
dislike the new, the true, the accurate, and the beauti- 
ful, because we will not seek, or cannot grasp, them. 
We are afflicted with that complex of democracy — a 
distrust of the best. Nine out of ten magazines, nine 



194 -^^^ Reviewing of Books 

out of ten libraries, nine out of ten intelligent American 
minds prove this accusation. 

And the cure is more civilization, more intellectuality, 
a finer and stronger emotion? One might as well say 
that the cure for being sick is to get well! This, in- 
deed, is the cure; but the remedy is a vigorous criti- 
cism. Call in the experts, let them name themselves 
and their qualifications like ancient champions, and 
then proceed to lay about with a will. Sometimes the 
maiden literature, queen of the tournament, will be 
slain instead of the Knight of Error, and often the 
spectators will be scratched by the whir of a sword. 
Nevertheless, the fight is in the open, we know the 
adversaries, and the final judgment, whether to salute 
a victor or condemn an impostor, is ours. 

Thus, figuratively, one might describe the proper 
function in criticism of a liberal journal of catholic 
criticism to-day. One thing I have omitted, that its 
duty is not limited to criticism, for if it is to be com- 
prehensive, it must present also vast quantities of ac- 
curate and indispensable facts, the news of literature. 
And one prerequisite I have felt it unnecessary to 
dwell upon. Unless its intent is honest, and its editors 
independent of influence from any self-interested 
source, the literary tournament of criticism becomes 
either a parade of the virtues with banners for the 
favorites, or a melee where rivals seek revenge. Venal 
criticism is the drug and dishonest criticism the poison 
of literature. 



The Race of Reviewers 

As a reviewer of books, my experience has been lengthy 
rather than considerable. It is, indeed, precisely 
twenty-two years since I wrote my first review, which 
ended, naturally, with the words ^'a good book to read 
of a winter evening before a roaring fire." I remem- 
ber them because the publishers, who are lovers of 
platitudes, quoted them, to my deep gratification, and 
perhaps because I had seen them before. Since then 
I have reviewed at least twice as many books as there 
are years in this record — about as many, I suppose, 
as a book-page war-horse in racing trim could do in a 
month, or a week. My credentials are not impressive 
in this category, but perhaps they will suffice. 

As an author, my claim to enter upon this self-con- 
tained symposium which I am about to present is some- 
what stronger. Authors, of course, read all the re- 
views of their books, even that common American vari- 
ety which runs like the telegraphic alphabet: quote — 
summarize — quote — quote — smnmarize — quote, and so 
on up to five dollars' worth, space rates. I have read 
all the reviews of my books except those which clipping 
bureaus seeking a subscription or kind friends wishing 
to chastise vicariously have neglected to send me. As 
an author I can speak with mingled feelings, but widely, 
of reviews. 

195 



196 The Reviewing of Books 

Editorially my experience has been equally poignant. 
For ten years I have read reviews, revised and unre- 
vised, in proof and out of it. I have cut reviews that 
needed cutting and meekly endured the curses of the 
reviewer. I have printed conscientiously reviews that 
had better been left unwritten, and held my head bloody 
but unbowed up to the buffets of the infuriated authors. 
As an editor I may say that I am at home, though 
not always happy, with reviewing and reviewers. 

And now, when in one of those rare moments of 
meditation which even New York permits I ask myself 
why does every man or woman with the least stir of 
literature in them wish to review books, my trinitarian 
self — critic, author, editor — ^holds high debate. For a 
long time I have desired to fight it out, and find, if 
it can be found, the answer. 

As an author, I have a strong distaste for reviewing. 
In the creative mood of composition, or in weary relax- 
ation, reviewing seems the most ungrateful of tasks. 
Nothing comes whole to a reviewer. Half of every 
book must elude him, and the other half he must 
compress into snappy phrases. I watch him working 
upon that corpus, which so lately was a thing of life 
and movement — my book — and see that he cannot lift 
it; that he must have some hand-hold to grip it by — 
my style or my supposed interest in the Socialist Party, 
or the fact that I am a professor or a Roman Catholic. 
Unless he can get some phrase that will explain the 
characters of my women, the length of my sentences, 
and the moral I so carefully hid in the last chapter, 



The Race of Reviewers 197 

he is helpless. Sometimes I find him running for a 
column without finding a gate to my mind, and then 
giving it up in mid-paragraph. Sometimes he gets 
inside, but dashes for the exit sign and is out before 
I know what he thinks. Sometimes he finds an idea 
to his liking, wraps up in it, and goes to sleep. 

I recognize his usefulness. I take his hard raps 
meekly and even remember them when next I begin 
to write. I do not hate him much when he tells 
the public not to read me. There is always the chance 
that he is right for his public; not, thank heavens, for 
mine. I am furious only when it is clear that he has 
not read me himself. But I cannot envy him. It is so 
much more agreeable to make points than to find them. 
It is so much easier, if you have a little talent, to 
build some kind of an engine that will run than to 
explain what precise fault prevents it from being the 
best. When I am writing a book I cannot understand 
the mania for criticism that seems to infect the major- 
ity of the literary kind. 

As a reviewer I must again confess, although as an 
editor I may bitterly regret the confession, that the 
passion for reviewing is almost inexplicable. Review- 
ing has the primal curse of hard labor upon it. You 
must do two kinds of work at once, and be adequately 
rewarded for neither. First you must digest another 
man's conception, assimilate his ideas, absorb his imagi- 
nation. It is like eating a cold dinner on a full stom- 
ach. And then when you have eaten and digested, you 
must tell how you feel about it — briefly, cogently, and 



198 The Reviewing of Books 

in words that cannot be misunderstood. Furthermore, 
your feelings must be typical, must represent what a 
thousand stomachs will feel, or should feel, or could 
feel if they felt at all, or instead of being hailed as a 
critic you will be accused of dyspepsia. 

The mere mental labor of picking up the contents 
of a book as you proceed with your criticism, and 
tucking them in here and there where they fit, is so 
great that, speaking as a reviewer, I should give up 
reviewing if there were no more compelling reasons than 
requests to write criticism. There are, there must be; 
and still speaking as a reviewer I begin to glimpse one 
or two of them. Revenge is not one. Critics have 
written for revenge, quoting gleefully, ^'O that mine 
enemy would write a book!" Pope is our classic ex- 
ample. But publishers have made that form of lit- 
erary vendetta unprofitable nowadays, and I am glad 
they have done so. Much wit, but little criticism, has 
been inspired by revenge. Furthermore, I notice in 
my own case, and my editorial self confirms the belief, 
that the reviewer craves books to extol, not books to 
condemn. He is happiest when his author is sympa- 
thetic to his own temperament. Antipathetic books 
must be forced upon him. 

Which leads me to the further conclusion that the 
prime motive for reviewing is the creative instinct. We 
all of us have it, all of the literary folk who make 
up a most surprising proportion of every community 
in the United States. It works on us constantly. 
Sometimes it comes to a head and then we do a story 



The Race of Reviewers 199 

or a poem, an essay or a book; but in the meantime 
it is constantly alive down below, drawn toward every 
sympathetic manifestation without, craving self-expres- 
sion and, in default of that, expression by others. If 
a book is in us we write; if it is not, we seize upon 
another man's child, adopt it as ours, talk of it, learn 
to understand it, let it go reluctantly with our blessing, 
and depart vicariously satisfied. That is the hope, the 
ever-renewed hope, with which the besotted reviewer 
takes up reviewing. 

The creative instinct indeed is sexed, like the human 
that possesses it. It seeks a mystical union with the 
imaginings of others. The poet, the novelist, the essay- 
ist, seek the mind of the reader; the critic seeks the 
mind of the writer. That we get so much bad review- 
ing is due to incompatibility of temperament or gross 
discrepancy in the mating intellects. Yet reviewers 
(and authors), like lovers, hope ever for the perfect 
match. 

I know one critic who tore his review in pieces be- 
cause it revealed the charlatanism of his beloved author. 
I know an author who burnt his manuscript because 
his friend and critic had misunderstood him. I see 
a thousand reviews (and have written several of them) 
where book and reviewer muddle along together like the 
partners of everyday marriages. But next time, one 
always hopes, it will be different. 

As an editor, I confess that I view all this effusion 
with some distrust. One plain fact stands high and 
dry above the discussion: books are being published 



200 The Reviewing of Books 

daily, and some one must tell the busy and none too 
discriminating public what they are worth — ^not to men- 
tion the librarians who are so engaged in making out 
triple cards and bibliographies and fitting titles to vague 
recollections that they have no time left to read. Fur- 
thermore, if reviewing is a chore at worst, and at best 
a desire to gratify a craving for the unappeasable, 
editing reviews is still more chorelike, and seeking the 
unobtainable^ — a good review for every good book — is 
quite as soul-exhausting as the creative instinct. 

And, again as an editor, the perfect marriage of well 
attuned minds is well enough as an ideal, but as a 
practicable achievement I find myself more often drawn 
toward what I should call the liaison function of a re- 
viewer. The desire to be useful (since we have ex- 
cluded the desire to make money as a major motive) is, 
I believe, an impulse which ver> often moves the re- 
viewer. The instinct to teach, to reform, to explain, 
to improve lies close to the heart of nine out of ten 
of us. It is commoner than the creative instinct. When 
it combines with it, one gets a potential reviewer. 

The reviewer as a liaison officer is a homelier de- 
scription than soul affinity or intellectual mate, but 
it is quite as honorable. Books (to the editor) repre- 
sent, each one of them, so much experience, so much 
thought, so much imagination differently compounded 
in a story, poem, tractate on science, history, or play. 
Each is a man's most luminous self in words, ready 
for others. Who wants it? Who can make use of it? 
Who will be dulled by it? Who exalted? It is the 



The Race of Reviewers 20l 

reviewer's task to say. He grasps the book, estimates 
it, calculates its audience. Then he makes the liaison. 
He explains, he interprets, and in so doing necessarily 
criticizes, abstracts, appreciates. The service is ines- 
timable, when properly rendered. It is essential for 
that growing literature of knowledge which science and 
the work of specialists in all fields have given us. Few 
readers can face alone and imaided a shelf of books on 
radio-activity, evolution, psychology, or sociology with 
any hope of selecting without guidance the best, or 
with any assurance that they dare reject as worthless 
what they do not understand. The house of the inter- 
preter has become the literary journal, and its useful- 
ness will increase. 

A liaison of a different kind is quite as needful in 
works of sheer imagination. Here the content is hu- 
xnan, the subject the heart, or life as one sees it. But 
reading, like writing, is a fine art that few master. 
Only the most sensitive, whose minds are as quick as 
their emotions are responsive, can go to the heart of 
a poem or a story. They need an interpreter, a tactful 
interpreter, who will give them the key and let them 
find their own chamber. Or who will wave them away 
from the door, or advise a brief sojourn. To an editor 
such an interpreter is an ideal reviewer. He will desire 
to be useful, and passionately attempt it. He will feel 
his responsibility first to art and next to the public, 
and then to his author, and last (as an editor I whisper 
it) to the publisher. Reviewers forget the author and 
the public. Their mandate comes from art (whose 



202 The Reviewing of Books 

representative in the flesh is, or should be, the editor). 
But their highest service is to make a liaison between 
the reader and his book. 

And the conclusion of this debate is, I think, a 
simple one. Reviewing is a major sport, fascinating 
precisely because of its difficulty, compelling precisely 
because it appeals to strong instincts. For most of 
us it satisfies that desire to work for some end which 
we ourselves approve, regardless of costs. The editor, 
sardonically aware of a world that refuses to pay 
much for what men do to please themselves or to 
reform others, sees here his salvation, and is thankful. 



The Sins of Reviewing 

I HAVE known thousands of reviewers and liked most 
of them, except when they sneered at my friends or 
at me. Their profession, in which I have taken a 
humble share, has always seemed to me a useful, and 
sometimes a noble one; and their contribution to the 
civilizing of reading man, much greater than the credit 
they are given for it. We divide them invidiously 
into hack reviewers and critics, forgetting that a hack 
is just a reviewer overworked, and a critic a reviewer 
with leisure to perform real criticism. A good hack 
is more useful than a poor critic, and both belong 
to the same profession as surely as WiUiam Shake- 
speare and the author of a Broadway "show." 

The trouble is that the business of reviewing has 
not been sufficiently recognized as a profession. Trades 
gain in power and recognition in proportion as their 
members sink individuahty in the mass and form a 
union which stands as one man against the world. 
Professions are different. They rise by decentraliza- 
tion, and by specializing within the group. They gain 
distinction not only by the achievements of their in- 
dividual members but by a curious splitting into sub- 
types of the species. Law and medicine are admirable 
examples. Every time they develop a new kind of 
specialist they gain in prestige and emolument. 

203 



204 The Reviewing of Books 

A reviewer, however (unless he publishes a collected 
edition and becomes a critic), has so far remained in 
the eyes of the public just a reviewer. In fiction we 
have been told (by the reviewers) of romancers and 
realists, sociologists and ethicists, naturalists and sym- 
bolists, objectivists and psychologists. Are there no 
adjectives, no brevet titles of literary distinction for 
the men and women who have made it possible to talk 
intelligently about modern fiction without reading it? 

My experience with reviewers has led me to classify 
them by temperament rather than by the theories they 
possess; and this is not so unscientific as it sounds, for 
theories usually spring from temperaments. No man 
whose eliminatory processes function perfectly is ever 
a pessimist, except under the compulsion of hard facts. 
No sluggish liver ever believes that joy of living is 
the prime quality to be sought in literary art. And 
by the same eternal principle, moody temperaments 
embrace one theory of criticism; cold, logical minds 
another. I identify my classes of reviewers by their 
habits, not their dogmas. 

But in order to clear the ground let me make first 
a larger distinction, into mythical reviewers, bad but 
useful reviewers, bad and not useful reviewers, and 
good reviewers. Like the nineteenth century preacher 
I will dispose of the false, dwell upon the wicked, and 
end (briefly) with that heaven of literary criticism 
where all the authors are happy and all the reviewers 
excellent. 

The reviewer I know best never, I profoundly be- 



The Sins of Reviewing 205 

lieve, has existed, and I fear never will exist. He is the 
familiar figure of English novels — moderately young, 
a bachelor, with a just insufficient income in stocks, 
Oxford or Cambridge is his background, and his future 
is the death of a rich aunt or a handsome marriage. 
In the meantime, there is always a pile of books wait- 
ing in his chambers to be reviewed at "a guinea a 
page," when he has leisure, which is apparently only 
once or twice a week. The urban pastoral thus pre- 
sented is one which Americans may well be envious of 
— otium cum dignitate. But I have never encountered 
this reviewer in London. I fear he exists only for the 
novelists, who created him in order to have a literary 
person with enough time on his hands to pursue the 
adventures required by the plot. Yet in so far as 
he is intended as a portrait of a critic, he stands as 
an ideal of the leisured view of books. There has been 
no leisured view of books in America since Thoreau, 
or Washington Irving. Even Poe was feverish. Our 
books are read on the subway, or after the theater, 
and so I fear it is in London — in London as it is. 

Coldly, palpably real is the next critic of my ac- 
quaintance, the academic reviewer. He does not write 
for the newspapers, for he despises them, and they 
are rather scornful of his style, which is usually lum- 
bering, and his idea that 192 1 is the proper time in 
which to review the books of 1920. But you will find 
him in the weeklies, and rampant in the technical 
journals. 

The academic reviewer is besotted by facts, or their 



2o6 The Reviewing of Books 

absence. The most precious part of the review to him 
is the last paragraph in which he points out misspell- 
ings, bad punctuation, and inaccuracies generally. Like 
a hound dog in a corn field, he never sees his books 
as a whole, but snouts and burrows along the trail 
he is following. If he knows the psychology of primi- 
tive man, primitive psychology he will find and criti- 
cize, even in a book on the making of gardens. If 
his specialty is French drama, French drama he will 
find, even in a footnote, and root it out and nuzzle it. 
I remember when a famous scholar devoted the whole 
of his review of a two volume magnum opus upon a 
great historical period, to the criticism of the text 
of a Latin hymn cited in a footnote! The academic 
reviewer (by which I do not mean the university re- 
viewer, since many such are not academic in the bad 
sense which I am giving to the word) demands an 
index. His reviews usually end with, "There is no 
index,'' or, "There is an excellent index." The reason 
is plain. The index is his sole guide to reviewing. If 
he finds his pet topics there he can hunt them down 
remorselessly. But if there is no index, he is cast 
adrift helpless, knowing neither where to begin nor 
where to end his review. I call him a bad reviewer, 
but useful, because, though incapable of estimating 
philosophies or creations of the imagination, he is our 
best guarantee that writers' facts are facts. 

My acquaintance with the next bad, but occasionally 
useful, reviewer is less extensive, but, by the circum- 
stances of the case, more intimate. I shall call him 



The Sins of Reviewing 207 

the ego-frisky reviewer. The term (which I am quite 
aware is a barbarous compound) I am led to invent 
in order to describe the phenomenon of a critic whose 
ego frisks merrily over the corpus of his book. He 
is not so modern a product as he himself believes. 
The vituperative critics of the Quarterlies and, earlier 
still, of Grub Street, used their enemies' books as a 
means of indulging their needs for self-expression. 
But it was wrath, jealousy, vindictiveness, or political 
enmity which they discharged while seated on the 
body of the foe; whereas the ego-friskish critic has 
no such bile in him. 

He is in fact a product of the new advertising psy- 
chology, 7/hich says, "Be human" (by which is meant 
"be personal") "first of all." He regards his book 
(I know this, because he has often told m.e so) as a 
text merely, for a discourse which must entertain the 
reader. And his idea of entertainment is to write 
about himself, his tastes, his moods, his reactions. 
Either he praises the book for what it does to his 
ego, or damns it for what it did to his ego. You will 
never catch him between these extremes, for modera- 
tion is not his vice. 

The ego-frisky reviewer is not what the biologist 
would call a pure form. He (or she) is usually a yellow 
journalist, adopting criticism as a kind of protective 
coloration. The highly personal critic, adventuring, or 
even frolicking among masterpieces, and recording his 
experiences, is the true type, and it is he that the ego- 
friskish imitate. Such a critic in the jovial person of 



2o8 The Reviewing of Books 

Mr. Chesterton, or Professor Phelps, or Heywood 
Broun, contributes much to the vividness of our sense 
for books. But their imitators, although they some- 
times enliven, more often devastate reviewing. 

Alas, I am best acquainted among them all with the 
dull reviewer, who is neither good nor useful. The ex- 
cellent books he has poisoned as though by opiates! 
The dull books he has made duller ! No one has cause 
to love him unless it be the authors of weak books, 
who thank their dull critics for exposing them in re- 
views so tedious that no one discovers what the criti- 
cism is about. 

The dull reviewer has two varieties: the stupid and 
the merely dull. It is the stupid reviewer who exas- 
perates beyond patience the lover of good books. He 
is the man who gets a book wrong from the start, and 
then plods on after his own conception, which has no 
reference whatsoever to the author's. He is the man 
who takes irony seriously, misses the symbolism when 
there is any, and invariably guesses wrong as to the 
sources of the characters and the plot. 

There are not many really stupid reviewers, for the 
most indolent editor cleans house occasionally, and the 
stupid are the first to go out the back door. But merely 
dull reviewers are as plentiful as fountain pens. The 
dull reviewer, like Chaucer's drunken man, knows 
where he wants to go but doesn't know how to get there. 
He (or she) has three favorite paths that lead nowhere, 
all equally devious. 

The first is by interminable narrative. "When Hilda 



The Sins of Reviewing 209 

was blown into the arms of Harold Garth at the windy 
corner of the Woolworth building, neither guessed at 
what was to follow. Beginning with this amusing sit- 
uation, the author of The Yellow Moon' develops a 
very interesting plot. Garth was the nephew of Miles 
Harrison, Mayor of New York. After graduating from 
Williams, etc., etc., etc." This is what he calls sum- 
marizing the plot. 

Unfortunately, the art of summary is seldom mas- 
tered, and a bad summary is the dullest thing in the 
world. Yet even a bad summary of a novel or a book 
of essays is hard to do; so that when the dull reviewer 
has finished, his sweaty brow and numbed fingers per- 
suade him that he has written a review. There is time 
for just a word of quasi-criticism : "This book would 
have been better if it had been shorter, and the plot is 
not always logical. Nevertheless, The Yellow Moon' 
holds interest throughout." And then, finis. This is 
botchery and sometimes butchery, not reviewing. 

The dullest reviewers I have known, however, have 
been the long-winded ones. A book is talk about life, 
and therefore talk about a book is one remove more 
from the reality of experience. Talk about talk must 
be good talk, and it must be sparing of words. A con- 
cise style is nearly always an interesting style: even 
though it repel by crudity it will never be dull. But 
conciseness is not the quality I most often detect in 
reviewing. It is luxurious to be concise when one is 
writing at space rates; and it is always harder to say 
a thing briefly than at length, just as it is easier for 



2IO The Reviewing of Books 

a woman to hit a nail at the third stroke than at the 
first. 

I once proposed a competition in a college class in 
English composition. Each student was to clip a col- 
umn newspaper article of comment (not facts) and 
condense it to the limit of safety. Then editorials gave 
up their gaseous matter in clouds, chatty news stories 
boiled away to paragraphs, and articles shrank up to 
their headlines. 

But the reviews suffered most. One, I remember, 
came down to "It is a bad book," or to express it 
algebraically, (It is a bad book)^. Another disappeared 
entirely. On strict analysis it was discovered that the 
reviewer had said nothing not canceled out by some- 
thing else. But most remained as a weak liquor of 
comment upon which floated a hard cake of undigested 
narrative. One student found a bit of closely reasoned 
criticism that argued from definite evidences to a con- 
crete conclusion. It was irreducible; but this was a 
unique experience. 

The long-winded are the dullest of dull reviewers, 
but the most pernicious are the wielders of cliches and 
platitudes. Is there somewhere a reviewer's manual, 
like the manual of correct social phrases which some 
one has recently published? I would believe it from 
the evidence of a hundred reviews in which the same 
phrases, differently arranged, are applied to fifty dif- 
ferent books. I would believe it, except for the known 
capacity of man to borrow most of his thoughts and 
all of his phrases from his neighbor. I know too well 



''39B 



The Si7is of Reviewing 2ii 

that writers may operate like the Federal Reserve 
banks, except that in literature there is no limit to 
inflation. A thousand thousand may use ''a novel of 
daring adventure," "a poem full of grace and beauty," 
or ^'shows the reaction of a thoughtful mind to the facts 
of the universe," without exhausting the supply. It is 
like the manufacture of paper money, and the effect 
on credit is precisely the same. 

So much for the various types of reviewers who, 
however interesting they may be critically, cannot be 
called good. The good reviewers, let an uncharitable 
world say what it will, are, thank heaven ! more numer- 
ous. Their divisions, temperamental and intellectual, 
present a curious picture of the difficulties and the 
rewards of this profession. Yet I cannot enter upon 
them here, and for good reasons. 

The good reviewer is like the good teacher and the 
good preacher. He is not rare, but he is precious. 
He has qualities that almost escape analysis and there- 
fore deserve more than a complimentary discussion. 
He must hold his book like a crystal ball in which he 
sees not only its proper essence in perfect clarity, but 
also his own mind mirrored. He must — ... In 
other words, the good reviewer deserves an essay of 
his own. He is a genius in a minor art, which some- 
times becomes major; a craftsman whose skill is often 
exceptional. I will not put him in the same apartment 
with reviewers who are arid, egoistic, or dull. 



Mrs. Wharton's "The Age of 
Innocence" 

America is the land of cherished illusions. Americans 
prefer to believe that they are innocent, innocent of 
immorality after marriage, innocent of dishonesty in 
business, innocent of incompatibility between husbands 
and wives. Americans do not like to admit the exist- 
ence (in the family) of passion, of unscrupulousness, 
of temperament. They have made a code for what 
is to be done, and what is not to be done, and what- 
ever differs is un-American. If their right hands offend 
them they cut them off rather than admit possession. 
They believed in international morality when none ex- 
isted, and when they were made to face the disagree- 
able fact of war, cast off the nations of the earth, 
and continued to believe in national morality. 

In America prostitution is tolerated in practice, but 
forbidden in print. All homes are happy unless there 
is proof to the contrary, and then they are un-American. 
In its wilful idealism America is determined that at 
all costs we shall appear to be innocent. /And a novel 
which should begin with the leaders in social conform- 
ity, who keep hard and clean the code, and should 
sweep through the great middle classes that may escape 
its rigors themselves, but exact them of others, might 
present the pageant, the social history, the epic of 
America. 

212 

% 



Wharton's ^^The Age of Innocence" 213 

Of course, Mrs. Wharton's novel does nothing of 
the sort. This is how Tolstoy, or H. G. Wells, or 
Ernest Poole would have written "The Age of Inno- 
cence." They would have been grandiose, epical; their 
stories would have been histories of culture. It would 
have been as easy to have called their books broad 
as it is to call Mrs. Wharton's fine novel narrow. Ten- 
dencies, philosophies, irrepressible outbursts would have 
served as their protagonists, where hers are dwellers 
in Fifth Avenu^ or Waverly Place — a cosmopolitan 
astray, a dowager, a clubman yearning for intellectual 
sympathy. 

And yet in the long run it comes to much the same 
thing. The epic novelists prefer the panorama: she 
the drawing-room canvas. They deduce from vast 
philosophies and depict society. She gives us the Min- 
gotts, the Mansons, the Van der Luydens — society, in 
its little brownstone New York of the '70's — and lets us 
formulate inductively the code of America. A little 
canvas is enough for a great picture if the painting is 
good. 

Indeed, the only objection I have ever heard urged 
against Mrs. Wharton's fine art of narrative is that 
it is narrow — an art of dress suit and sophistication. 
And this book is the answer. For, of course, her art 
is narrow — like Jane Austen's, like Sheridan's, like 
Pope's, like Maupassant's, like that of all writers who 
prefer to study human nature in its most articulate 
instead of its broadest manifestations. It is narrow 
because it is focussed, but this does not mean that it 



214 The Reviewing of Books 

is small. Although the story of ^^The Age of Inno- 
cence" might have been set in a far broader back- 
ground, it is the circumstances of the New York society 
which Mrs. Wharton knows so well that give it a 
piquancy, a reality that "epics" lack. They are like 
the accidents of voice, eye, gesture which determine 
individuality. Yet her subject is America. 

This treating of large themes by highly personal sym- 
bols makes possible Mrs. Wharton's admirable perfec- 
tion of technique. Hers is the technique of sculpture 
rather than the technique of architecture. It permits 
the fine play of a humor that has an eye of irony in 
it, but is more human than irony. It makes possible 
an approach to perfection. Behold Mrs. Manson Min- 
go tt, the indomitable dowager, Catherine: 

The immense accretions of flesh which had descended on 
her in middle life, like a flood of lava on a doomed city had 
changed her . . . into something as vast and august as a 
natural phenomenon. She had accepted this submergence as 
philosophically as all her other trials, and now, in extreme 
old age, was rewarded by presenting to her mirror an almost 
unwrinkled expanse of firm pink and white flesh, in the 
center of which the traces of a small face survived as if 
awaiting excavation. . . . Around and below, wave after 
wave of black silk surged away over the edges of a capacious 
armchair, with two tiny white hands poised like gulls on the 
surface of the billows. 

Her art is restrained, focussed upon those points 
v/here America, in its normality and in its eccentricity, 



Wharton s ^^The Age of Innocence'' 21^ 

has become articulate. Therefore it is sharp and con- 
vincing. 

Who is the central figure in this story where the 
leaven of intellectual and emotional unrest works in a 
society that has perfected its code and intends to live 
by it? Is it Newland Archer, who bears the uncom- 
fortable ferment within him? Is it his wife, the lovely 
May, whose clear blue eyes will see only innocence? 
Is it the Countess Olenska, the American who has seen 
reality and suffered by it, and sacrifices her love for 
Newland in order to preserve his innocence? No one 
of these is the center of the story, but rather the idea 
of "the family," this American "family," which is moral 
according to its lights, provincial, narrow — ^but in- 
tensely determined that its world shall appear upright, 
faithful, courageous, in despite of facts, and regardless 
of how poor reality must be tortured until it conforms. 
And the "family" as Mrs. Wharton describes it is just 
the bourgeois Puritanism of nineteenth century 
America. 

Was May right when, with the might of innocence, 
she forced Newland to give up life for mere living? 
Was the Countess right when, in spite of her love 
for him, she aided and abetted her, making him live 
up to the self-restraint that belonged to his code? The 
story does not answer, being concerned with the qual- 
ities of the "family," not with didacticism. 

It says that the insistent innocence of America had 
its rewards as well as its penalties. It says, in so 



2i6 The Reviewing of Books 

far as it states any conclusion definitely, that a new 
and less trammeled generation must answer whether it 
was the discipline of its parents that saved the Ameri- 
can family from anarchy, or the suppressions of its 
parents that made it rebellious. And the answer is 
not yet. 

"The Age of Innocence" is a fine novel, beautifully 
written, "big" in the best sense, which has nothing to 
do with size, a credit to American literature — for if 
its author is cosmopolitan, this novel, as much as her 
earlier "Ethan Frome," is a fruit of our soil. 

November 6, 1920. 



Mr. Hergesheimer's "Cytherea" 

Mrs. Wharton found the age of innocence in the 
1870's; Mr. Hergesheimer discovers an age of no inno- 
cence in the 1920's. In "The Age of Innocence," the 
lovely May, a creature of society's conventions, loses 
her husband and then regains the dulled personality 
left from the fire of passion. In "Cytherea" the less 
lovely, but equally moral Fanny loses her Lee because 
she cannot satisfy his longings and nags when she fails. 
But she does not regain him when his love chase is 
over, because he is burned out. Athene and Aphrodite, 
the graces of the mind, the seductions of the person 
of the Countess Olenska, together draw Newland 
Archer, husband of May; but it is Aphrodite only, 
Cytherean Aphrodite, who, being sex incarnate, is more 
than mere temptations of the flesh, that wrecks Fanny's 
home. 

In the '70's the poor innocents of society believed 
their code of honor impregnable against sex. They 
dressed against sex, talked against sex, kept sex below 
the surface. The suppression froze some of them into 
rigidity and stiffened all. But they had their compen- 
sations. By sacrificing freedom for personal desire 
they gained much security. Good husbands required 
more than a lure of the body to take them off. And 
when they gave up a great romance for respectability, 

217 



21 8 The Reviewing of Books 

like Newland Archer, at least they remained gentlemen. 
There was a tragedy of thwarted development, of mar- 
tyred love, of waste; but at least self-respect, however 
misguided, remained. 

Not so with this trivial, lawless country club set of 
the 1920's, drunk part of the time and reckless all of 
it, codeless, dutiless, restless. For the virtuous among 
them Aphrodite, a vulgar, shameless Aphrodite, was a 
nightly menace; for the weak among them (such as 
Peyton Morris), a passion to be resisted only by fear; 
for the wayward, like Lee, she was the only illusion 
worth pursuing. To resist for a woman was to become 
^'blasted and twisted out of her purpose," to be 
"steeped in vinegar or filled with tallow"; to resist for 
a man was to lose the integrity of his personality. 
There were no moral compensations, for there is no 
morality but self -development, at least in Mr. Herges- 
heimer's town of Eastlake. There is no god for a man 
in love but Cytherea. 

And this is one way of describing Mr. Hergesheimer's 
study of love in idleness in the 1920's. Another way 
would be to call it an essay upon insecurity, although 
the word essay is too dry to use in a story which is fairly 
awash with alcohol. The war, the story seems to say, 
sapped our security of property and comfort and life. 
But insecurity is an insidious disease that spreads, like 
bacteria, where strength is relaxed. It infects the lives 
of those who have lost their certainties and become 
doubtful of their wills. In this relaxed society of the 
1920's, where nothing seemed certain but the need of 



Mr. Hergesheimers '^Cytherea'' 219 

money and a drink, insecurity spread into married life. 
Not even the well-mated were secure in the general 
decline of use and wont. A home wrecked by vague 
desires running wild — that is the theme of ''Cytherea." 

Or take a third view of this provocative book. The 
triangle we have had tiresomely with us, but it is 
woman's love that is, perversely, always the hero. 
Hergesheimer studies the man, studies him not as will, 
or energy, or desire a-struggle with duty or morality, 
but merely as sex. Man's sex in love, man's sex domi- 
nated by Cytherea, is his theme. This is new, at least 
in fiction, for there man is often swept away, but seldom 
dominated by sex. And indeed Hergesheimer has to 
find his man in the relaxed society to which I have 
referred, a society wearied by unchartered freedom, 
where business is profitable but trivial, where duty and 
religion exist only as a convention, disregarded by the 
honest, upheld by the hypocritical, a society where 
Cytherea marks and grips her own. Even so, it is an 
achievement. 

Cytherea in the story is a doll with a glamorous 
countenance, bought and cherished by Lee Randon as 
a symbol of what he did not find in his married life, 
what no man finds and keeps, because it is an "illusion. 
Cytherea is Lee Randon 's longing for emotional satis- 
faction, a satisfaction that is not to be of the body 
merely. And when he meets Savina Grove, a patho- 
logical case, whose violent sex emotions have been 
inhibited to the bursting point, he thinks (and fears) 
that he has found his heart's desire. In the old, old 



220 The Reviewing of Books 

stories their elopement would have been their grand, 
their tragic romance. In this cruel novel it is tragic, 
for she dies of it; but she is not Cytherea; she is 
earthly merely; it is felt that she is better dead. 

It is a cruel story, cruel in its depiction of an almost 
worthless society with just enough of the charm of the 
Restoration to save it from beastliness; cruel in its un- 
sparing analyses of man^s sex impulses (by all odds the 
most valuable part of the story); cruel particularly 
because the ruined Lee Randon is a good fellow, hon- 
ester than most, kinder than he knows to individuals, 
although certain that there is no principle but selfish- 
ness, and that it is folly to limit desire for the sake 
of absolutes, like righteousness, or generalities, like the 
human race. It is a cruel study of women, for Fanny, 
the model of the domestic virtues, has lost her innocent 
certainties of the triumph of the right and at the first 
conflict with Cytherea becomes a common scold; cruel 
to Savina Grove, who, in spite of her exquisiteness, is 
only a psychoanalyst's problem; cruel to us all in ex- 
posing so ruthlessly how distressing it is to live by 
stale morality, yet how devastating to act with no 
guide but illusory desire. 

All this is not new in outline. One can find the es- 
sence of this story in monkish manuals. There the 
menace of Cytherea was not evaded. There the weak- 
nesses of man's sex were categoried with less psychol- 
ogy but more force. What is new in Hergesheimer's 
book is merely the environment in which his characters 
so disastrously move and an insight into the mechanism 



Mr. Hergesheimers ^^Cytherea" 221 

of their psychology which earlier writers lacked. I 
have called it a story of the age of no innocence, but 
that would be the author's term, not mine; for indeed 
his characters seem to display as naive an innocence 
as Mrs. Wharton's of the laws of blood and will, and 
they know far less of practical morality. The "Age 
of Moral Innocence" I should rechristen Hergesheimer's 
book. 

Critics will raise, and properly, a question as to the 
worth of his materials. He is not studying a "ripe" 
society, as was Mrs. Wharton, but the froth of the 
war, the spume of country clubs, the trivialities of 
the strenuous but unproductive rich. This is a just 
criticism as far as it goes, and it lessens the solidity, 
the enduring interest, of his. achievement. True, it was 
in such a society that he could best pursue the wiles 
of Cytherea. He has a right to pitch his laboratory 
where he pleases, and out of some very sordid earth 
he has contrived some beauty. Nevertheless, you can- 
not make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, skilled though 
you may be. 

I should be more inclined, however, in a comparison 
with Mrs. Wharton, to criticize his lack of detachment. 
That able novelist, who is bounded so exclusively in 
her little social world, nevertheless stands apart from 
it and sees it whole. Mr. Hergesheimer has his feet 
still deep in the soil. He is too much a part of his 
country club life. He means, perhaps, to be ironical, 
but in truth he is too sympathetic with the desires, 



222 The Reviewing of Books 

emotional and esthetic, that he expresses to be ironical 
until the close. There is a surprise, too sharp a sur- 
prise, at the end of his novel, when one discovers that 
the moral is not "do and dare," but "all is vanity." 
He is so much and so lusciously at home with cock- 
tails, legs, limousine parties, stair-sittings, intra-matri- 
monial kissings (I mention the most frequent refer- 
ences) that one distrusts the sudden sarcasm of his 
finale. It would have been better almost if he had been 
a Count de Gramont throughout, for he has a flair 
for the surroundings of amorous adventure and is sel- 
dom gross; better still to have seen, as Mrs. Wharton 
saw, the picture in perspective from the first. His book 
will disgust some and annoy others because its art is 
muddied by a lingering naturalism and too highly col- 
ored by the predilections of the artist. 

It is a skilful art, nevertheless, and "Cytherea" con- 
firms a judgment long held that Mr. Hergesheimer is 
one of the most skilful craftsmen in English in our day. 
And this I say in spite of his obvious failure to grasp 
inevitably the structure of the English sentence. He 
is one of the most honest analysts of a situation, also; 
one of the most fearless seekers of motives; one of 
the ablest practisers of that transmutation of obscure 
emotion into the visible detail of dress, habit, expres- 
sion, which is the real technique of the novelist. His 
fault is a defect in sympathy, a lack of spiritual appre- 
ciation, if I may use and leave undefined so old-fash- 
ioned a term. His virtue lies in the rich garment of 
experience which careful observation and skilful writ- 



Mr, Hergesheimers ^'Cytherea'' 223 

ing enable him to wrap about his imaginative concep- 
tions. It is this which makes his novels so readable for 
the discriminating at present, and will make them useful 
historical records in the future. One aspect of a trou- 
blesome period when the middle generation achieved 
the irresponsibility without the earnestness of youth 
he has caught in ^'Cytherea." It is unfortunate that it 
is a partial portrait of important motives in people who 
themselves are of little importance; and it is doubly un- 
fortunate that he has been too much a part of his 
muddy world to be as good an interpreter as he is a 
witness of its life. 
January 21, 1922. 



/ 



V 

Philistines and Dilettante 



Poetry for the Unpoetical 

I HAVE looked through more essays upon poetry than 
I care to remember without fmding an3Avhere a discus- 
sion of poetry for the unpc/etical. A recent writer, it 
is true, has done much to shew that the general reader 
daily indulges in poetry of i kind without knowing it. 
But the voluminous literature of poetics is well-nigh all 
special. It is written for students of rhythm, for in- 
stinctive lovers of poetry, for writers of verse, for 
critics. It does not treat of the value of poetry for 
the average, the unpoetical man — it says little of his 
curious distaste for all that is not prose, or of the 
share in all good poetry that belongs to him. 

By the average man, let me hasten to say, I mean 
in this instance the average intelligent reader, who has 
passed through the usual formal education in literature, 
v/ho reads books as well as nev/spapers and magazines, 
who, without calling himself a litterateur, would be will- 
ing to assert that he was fairly well read and reasonably 
fond of good reading. Your doctor, your lawyer, the 
president of your bank, and any educated business 
man who has not turned his brain into a machine, will 
fit my case. 

Among such excellent Americans, I find that there 
exists a double standard as regards all literature, but 

227 



228 Philistines and Dilettante 

especially poetry. Just as the newspapers always write 
of clean politics with reverence — ^whatever may be the 
private opinions and practices of their editorial writers 
— so intelligent, though unpoetic, readers are accus- 
tomed to speak of poetry with very considerable re- 
spect. It is not proper to say, '^I hate poetry," even 
if one thinks it. To admit ignorance of Tennyson or 
Milton or Shakespeare is bad form, even if one skimmed 
through them in college and has never disturbed the 
dust upon their covers since. I have heard a whispered, 
sneering remark after dinner, "I don't believe he ever 
heard of Browning," by one who had penetrated about 
as far into Browning's inner consciousness as a fly 
into the hickory-nut it crawls over. I well remember 
seeing a lady of highly respectable culture hold up her 
hands in horror before a college graduate who did not 
know who Beowulf was. Neither did she, in any true 
sense of knowing. But her code taught her that the 
"Beowulf," like other "good poetry," should be upon 
one's Hst of acquaintances. 

What these Americans really think is a very different 
matter. The man in the trolley-car, the woman in the 
rocking-chair, the clerk, the doctor, the manufacturer, 
most lawyers, and some ministers would, if their hearts 
were opened, give simply a categorical negative. They 
do not like poetry, or they think they do not like it; 
in either case with the same result. The rhythm an- 
noys them (little wonder, since they usually read it 
as prose), the rhyme seems needless, the inversions, 
the compressions perplex their minds to no valuable 



Poetry for the Unpoetical 229 

end. Speaking honestly, they do not like poetry. And 
if their reason is the old one, 

I do not like you, Dr. Fell ; 
The reason why I cannot tell, 

it is none the less effective. 

But the positive answers are no more reassuring. 
Here in America especially, when we like poetry, we 
like it none too good. The "old favorites'' are almost 
all platitudinous in thought and monotonous in rhythm. 
We prefer sentiment, and have a weakness for slush. 
Pathos seems to us better than tragedy, anecdote than 
wit. Longfellow was and is, except in metropolitan 
centres, our favorite "classical" poet; the poetical cor- 
ner and the daily poem of the newspapers represent 
what most of us like when we do go in for verse. The 
truth is that many of the intelligent in our population 
skip poetry in their reading just because it is poetry. 
They read no poetry, or they read bad poetry occa- 
sionally, or they read good poetry badly. 

This sorry state of affairs does not trouble the lit- 
erary critic. His usual comment is that either one 
loves poetry or one does not, and that is all there is 
to be said about it. If the general reader neglects 
poetry, why then he belongs to the Lost Tribes and 
signifies nothing for Israel. 

I am sure that he is wrong. His assertion is based 
on the theory that every man worthy of literary salva- 
tion must at all times love and desire the best literature, 
which is poetry — and this is a fallacy. It is as absurd 



230 Philistines and Dilettante 

as if he should ask most of us to dwell in religious ex- 
altation incessantly, or to live exclusively upon moun- 
tain peaks, or to cultivate rapture during sixteen hours 
of the twenty-four. The saints, the martyrs, the seers, 
the seekers, and enthusiasts have profited nobly by such 
a regime, but not we of common clay. To assume in 
advocating the reading of poetry that one should sub- 
stitute Pope for the daily paper, Francis Thompson for 
the illustrated weekly. The Ring and the Book for 
a magazine, and read "The Golden Treasury" through 
instead of a novel, needs only to be stated to be dis- 
proved. And yet this is the implication of much lit- 
erary criticism. 

But the sin of the general reader who refuses all 
poetry is much more deadly, for it is due not to en- 
thusiasm, but to ignorance. It is true that the literary 
diet recommended by an esthetic critic would choke a 
healthy business man; but it is equally true that for 
all men whose emotions are still alive within them, 
and whose intelligence permits the reading of verse, 
poetry is quite as valuable as fresh air and exercise. 
We do not need fresh air and exercise constantly. We 
can get along very comfortably without them. But 
if they are not essential commodities, they are impor- 
tant ones, and so is poetry — a truth of which modern 
readers seem to be as ignorant as was primitive man of 
fire until he burned his hand in a blazing bush. 

I do not mean for an instant to propose that every 
one should read poetry. The man whose imagination 
has never taken fire from literature of any kind, whose 



Poetry for the Unpoetical 231 

brain is literal and dislikes any embroidery upon the 
surface of plain fact, who is deaf to music, unrespon- 
sive to ideas, and limited in his emotions — such a man 
in my opinion is unfortunate, although he is often an 
excellent citizen, lives happily, makes a good husband, 
and may save the state. But he should not (no danger 
that he will) read poetry. And for another class there 
is nothing in poetry. The emotionally dying or dead; 
the men who have sunk themselves, their personalities, 
their hopes, their happiness, in business or scholarship 
or politics or sport — they, too, are often useful citizens, 
and usually highly prosperous; but they would waste 
their time upon literature of any variety, and especially 
upon poetry. 

There are a dozen good arguments, however, to prove 
that the reading of poetry is good for the right kind 
of general reader, who is neither defective nor dead 
in his emotions; and this means, after all, a very large 
percentage of all readers. If I had space I should use 
them all, for I realize that the convention we have 
adopted for poetry makes us skip, in our magazines, 
as naturally from story to story over the verse between 
as from stone to stone across the brook. However, I 
choose only two, which seem to me as convincing for 
the unpoetical reader (the dead and defective excepted) 
as the ethical grandeur of poetry, let us say, for the 
moralist, its beauty for the esthete, its packed knowl- 
edge for the scholar. 

The first has often been urged before and far more 
often overlooked. We everyday folk plod year after 



232 Philistines and Dilettante 

year through routine, through fairly good or fairly bad, 
never quite realizing what we are experiencing, never 
seeing life as a whole, or any part of it, perhaps, in 
complete unity. Words, acts, sights, pass through our 
experience hazily, suggesting meanings which we never 
fully grasp. Grief and love, the most intense, perhaps, 
of sensations, we seldom understand except by compari- 
son with what has been said of the grief and love of 
others. Happiness remains at best a diffused emotion 
— felt, but not comprehended. Thought, if in some 
moment of intense clarity it grasps our relationship to 
the stream of life, in the next shreds into trivialities. 
Is this true? Test it by any experience that is still 
fresh in memory. See how dull, by comparison with 
the vivid colors of the scene itself, are even now your 
ideas of what it meant to you, how obscure its rela- 
tions to your later life. The moment you fell in love, 
the hour after your child had died, the instant when 
you reached the peak, the quarrel that began a mis- 
understanding not yet ended, the subtle household 
strain that pulls apart untiringly though it never sun- 
ders two who love each other — all these I challenge 
you to define, to explain, to lift into the light above 
the turbid sea of complex currents which is life. 

And this, of course, is what good poetry does. It 
seizes the moment, the situation, the thought; drags 
it palpitating from life and flings it, quivering with its 
own rhythmic movement, into expression. The thing 
cannot be done in mere prose, for there is more than 
explanation to the process. The words themselves, in 



Poetry for the Unpoetical 233 

their color and suggestiveness, the rhythms that carry 
them, contribute to the sense, even as overtones help 
to make the music. 

All this may sound a little exalted to the com- 
fortable general reader, who does not often deal in 
such intense commodities as death and love. And 
yet I have mentioned nothing that does not at one 
time or another, and frequently rather than the oppo- 
site, come into his life, and need, not constant, certainly, 
but at least occasional, interpretation. Death and love, 
and also friendship, jealousy, courage, self-sacrifice, 
hate — these cannot be avoided. We must experience 
them. So do the animals, who gain from their experi- 
ences bhnd, instinctive repulsions or unreasoning likes 
and distrusts. There are many ways of escaping from 
such a bovine acquiescence, content to have felt, not 
desirous to grasp and know and relate. Poetry, which 
clears and intensifies like a glass held upon a distant 
snowpeak, is one of the best. 

But there is another service that poetry, among all 
writing, best renders to the general reader, when he 
needs it; a service less obvious, but sometimes, I think, 
more important. Poetry insures an extension of youth. 

Men and women vary in their emotional susceptibil- 
ity. Some go through life always clouded, always dull, 
like a piece of glass cut in semblance of a gem, that 
refracts no colors and is empty of light. Others are 
vivid, impressionable, reacting to every experience. 
Some of us are most aroused by contact with one an- 
other. Interer^t awakens at the sound of a voice; we 



234 Philistines and Dilettante 

are most alive when most with our kind. Others, like 
Thoreau, respond best in solitude. The veery thrush 
singing dimly in the hemlocks at twilight moves them 
more powerfully than a cheer. A deep meadow awave 
with headed grass, a solemn hill shouldering the sky, 
a clear blue air washing over the pasture slopes and 
down among the tree-tops of the valley, thrills them 
more than all the men in all the streets of the world. 
It makes no difference. To every one, dull and vivid, 
social and solitary, age brings its changes. We may 
understand better, but the vividness is less, the emo- 
tions are tamer. They do not fully respond, as the 
bell in the deserted house only half tinkles to our pull- 
ing. 

Si jeunesse savait, 
Si vieUiesse pouvait, 

6ut to be able comes before to know. We must 
react to experiences before it is worth while to com- 
prehend them. And after one is well enmeshed in 
the routine of plodding life, after the freshness of the 
emotions (and this is a definition of youth) is gone, 
it is difficult to react. I can travel now, if I wish, 
to the coral islands or the Spanish Main, but it is too 
late. 

Few willingly part with the fresh impressionability 
of youth. Sometimes, as I have already suggested, the 
faculties of sensation become atrophied, if indeed they 
ever existed. I know no more dismal spectacle than 
a man talking shop on a moonlit hill in August, a 



Poetry for the Unpoetical 235 

woman gossipping by the rail of a steamer plunging 
through the sapphire of the Gulf Stream, or a couple 
perusing advertisements throughout a Beethoven sym- 
phony. I will not advance as typical a drummer I 
once saw read a cheap magazine from cover to cover 
in the finest stretch of the Canadian Rockies. He 
was not a man, but a sample-fed, word-emitting ma- 
chine. These people, emotionally speaking, are senile. 
They should not try to read poetry. 

But most of us — even those who are outwardly com- 
monplace, practical, unenthusiastic, "solid," and not 
"sensitive" — lose our youthful keenness with regret. 
And that is why poetry, except for the hopelessly sod- 
den, is a tonic worthy of a great price. For the right 
poetry at the right time has the indubitable power to 
stir the emotions that experience is no longer able to 
arouse. I cannot give satisfactory instances, for the 
reaction is highly personal. What with me stirs a 
brain cell long dormant to action will leave another 
unmoved, and vice versa. However, to make clear my 
meaning, let us take Romance, the kind that one capi- 
talizes, that belongs to Youth, also capitalized, and 
dwells in Granada or Sicily or the Spanish Main. The 
middle-aged gentleman on a winter cruise for his 
jaded nerves cannot expect a thrill from sights alone. 
If it is not lost for him utterly, it is only because Keats 
has kept it, in — 

. . . Magic casements, opening on the foam 
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn, 



236 Philistines and Dilettante 

and Nashe in — 

Brightness falls from the air ; 
Queens have died young and fair. 

Or consider the joy of travel renewed in Kipling's^ — 

Then home, get her home, where the drunken rollers comb. 

And the shouting seas drive by. 
And the engines stamp and ring, and the wet bows reel and 
swing, 

And the Southern Cross rides high! 
Yes, the old lost stars wheel back, dear lass, 

That blaze in the velvet blue. 

Or the multitudinous experiences of vivid life that 
crowd the pages of men like Shakespeare, or Chaucer, 
who thanked God that he had known his world as in 
his time. Even in these shopworn quotations the power 
still remains. 

Somewhere in poetry, and best in poetry because 
there most concentrated and most penetrative, lies crys- 
tallized experience at hand for all who need it. It is 
not difficult to find, although no one can find it for 
you. It is not necessarily exalted, romantic, passion- 
ate; it may be comfortable, homely, gentle or hearty, 
vigorous and cheerful; it may be anything but common- 
place, for no true emotion is ever commonplace. I 
have known men of one poet; and yet that poet gave 
them the satisfaction they required. I know others 
whose occasional dip into poetry leads to no rapture of 



Poetry for the Unpoetical 237 

beauty, no throbbing vision into eternity; and yet with- 
out poetry they would be less alive, their minds would 
be less young. As children, most of us would have 
flushed before the beauty of a sunrise on a tropic ocean, 
felt dimly if profoundly — and forgotten. The poet — 
like the painter — ^has caught, has interpreted, has pre- 
served the experience, so that, hke music, it may be 
renewed. And he can perform that miracle for greater 
things than sunrises. This, perhaps, is the best of 
all reasons w^hy every one except the emotionally senile 
should sometimes read poetry. 

I know at least one honest Philistine who, unlike 
many Philistines, has traveled through the Promised 
Land — and does not like it. When his emotional 
friends talk sentimentalism and call it literature, or 
his esthetic acquaintances erect affectations and call 
them art, he has the proper word of irony that brings 
them back to food, money, and other verities. His 
voice haunts me now, suggesting that, in spite of the 
reasons I have advanced, the general reader can 
scarcely be expected to read modern poetry, and that 
therefore his habit of skipping must continue. He 
would say that most modern poetry is unreadable, at 
least by the average man. He would say that if the 
infinitely complex study of emotional mind-states that 
lies behind the poetry of Edwin Arlington Robinson, 
or the eerie otherworldliness of Yeats, or the harsh 
virility of Sandburg is to be regarded as an intensifica- 
tion and clarification of experience, he begs to be ex- 
cused. He would say that if the lyrics of subtle and 



238 Philistines and Dilettante 

passionate emotion and the drab stories of sex experi- 
ence that make up so many pages of modern anthol- 
ogies represent a renewal and extension of youth, it 
was not his youth. He prefers to be sanely old rather 
than erotically young. He will stick to the daily paper 
and fiat prose. 

Well, it is easy to answer him by ruling out modern 
poetry from the argument. There was more good 
poetry, neither complex, nor erotic, nor esoteric, written 
before our generation than even a maker of anthologies 
is likely to read. But I am not willing to dodge the 
issue so readily. There is modern poetry for every 
reader who is competent to read poetry at all. If there 
is none too much of it, that is his own fault. If there 
is much that makes no appeal to him, that is as it 
should be. 

It is true that a very large proportion of contemporary 
poetry is well-nigh unintelligible to the gentleman 
whose reading, like his experience, does not often ven- 
ture beyond the primitive emotions. Why should it 
not be? The modern lyric is untroubled by the social 
conscience. It is highly individual, for it is written 
by men of intense individuality for readers whose im- 
aginations require an intimate appeal. Such minds de- 
mand poetry prevailingly, just as the average reader 
demands prose prevailingly. They profit by prose now 
and then, just as, occasionally, he profits by poetry. 
We talk so much of the enormous growth of the mass 
of average readers in recent years that we forget the 
corresponding growth in the number of individualities 



Poetry for the Unpoetical 239 

that are not average. Much modern poetry is written 
for such readers, for men and women whose minds 
are sensitive to intricate emotional experience, who can 
and do respond to otherworldliness, to the subtly ro- 
mantic, the finely esthetic, and the intricately ideal. 
They deserve whatever poetry they may desire. 

The important point to note is that they do not get 
it. It is they — far more than the Philistines — ^who 
complain that modern poetry is insufficient for their 
needs. The highly personal lyric is probably more 
perfected, more abundant, and more poignant in its 
appeal to living minds now than ever before in the 
history of our civilization. But it occupies only one 
province of poetry. A lover of poetry desires, far more 
keenly than the general reader, to have verse of his 
own day that is more Shakespearian, more Miltonic, 
more Sophoclean than this. He wants poetry that lifts 
spacious times into spacious verse, poetry that "en- 
lum5nies," Hke Petrarch's "rhetorike sweete," a race 
and a civihzation. He desires, in addition to what he 
is already getting, precisely that poetry so universal 
in its subject-matter and its appeal, which the general 
reader thinks he would read if he found it instead of 
"lyrical subtleties" in his pages. 

Well, they do not get it very abundantly to-day, let 
us admit the fact freely. But the fault is not altogether 
the poets'. The fault is in the intractable mediocrity 
of the age, which resists transference into poetry as 
stiff clay resists the hoe of the cultivator. The fault 
lies in the general reader himself, whose very opposi- 



240 Philistines and Dilettante 

tion to poetry because it is poetry makes him a difficult 
person to write for. Commercialized minds, given over 
to convention, denying their sentiment and idealism, 
or wasting them upon cheap and meretricious litera- 
ture, do not make a good audience. Our few poets in 
English who have possessed some universality of ap- 
peal have had to make concessions. Kipling has been 
the m-ost popular among good English poets in our 
time? but he has had to put journalism into much of 
his poetry in order to succeed. And Kipling is not 
read so much as a certain American writer who dis- 
covered that by writing verse in prose form he could 
make the public forget their prejudice against poetry 
and indulge their natural pleasure in rhythm and rime. 
A striking proof of all that I have been writing is 
to be found in so-called magazine verse. Sneers at 
magazine poetry are unjust because they are unintelli- 
gent. It is quite true that most of it consists of the 
highly individualistic lyric of which I have spoken 
above. But in comparison with the imaginative prose 
of the typical popular magazine, it presents a most in- 
structive contrast. The prose is too frequently sensa- 
tional or sentimental, vulgar or smart. The verse, even 
though narrow in its appeal, and sometimes slight, is 
at least excellent in art, admirable in execution, and 
vigorous and. unsentimental in tone. Regarded as lit- 
erature, it is very much more satisfactory than the bulk 
of magazine prose. Indeed, there is less difference 
between the best and the worst of our magazines than 
between the verse and the prose in any one of them. 



Poetry for the Unpoetical 241 

And if this verse is too special in its subject-matter 
to be altogether satisfactory, if so little of it appeals 
to the general reader, is it not his fault? He neglects 
the poetry from habit rather than from conviction 
based on experience. Because he skips it, and has 
skipped it until habit has become a convention, much 
of it has become by natural adaptation of supply to 
demand too literary, too narrow, too subtle and com- 
plex for him now. The vicious circle is complete. 

This circle may soon be broken. A ferment, which 
in the 'nineties stirred in journalism, and a decade later 
transformed our drama, is working now in verse. The 
poetical revival now upon us may be richer so far in 
promise than in great poetry, but it is very significant. 
For one thing, it is advertising poetry, and since poetry 
is precisely what Shakespeare called it, caviare to the 
general — a special commodity for occasional use — a 
little advertising will be good for it. Again, the verse 
that has sprung from the movem.ent is much of it 
thoroughly interesting. Some of it is as bizarre as 
the new art of the futurists and the vorticists; some 
is merely vulgar, some merely affected, some hopelessly 
obscure; but other poems, without convincing us of 
their greatness, seem as original and creative as were 
Browning and Whitman in their day. Probably, like 
the new painting, the movement is more significant than 
the movers. 

Nevertheless, if one is willing to put aside prejudice, 
suspend judgment, and look ahead, vers libre, even 
when more libre than vers, is full of meaning — poetic 



242 Philistines and Dilettante 

realism, even when more real than poetry, charged with 
possibility. For with all its imperfections much of 
this new poetry is trying to mean more than ever be- 
fore to the general reader. I am not sure that the 
democracy can be interpreted for him in noble poetry 
and remain the democracy he knows. And yet I think, 
and I believe, that, in his sub-consciousness at least, he 
feels an intense longing to find the everyday life in 
which we all live — so thrilling beneath the surface — 
interpreted, swung into that rhythmic significance that 
will make it part of the vast and flowing stream of all 
life. I can tolerate many short, rough words in poetry, 
and much that we have been accustomed to regard 
as prose, on the way to such a goal. 

For I honestly believe that it is better to read fan- 
tastic poetry, coarse poetry, prosaic poetry — anything 
but vulgar and sentimental poetry — than no poetry 
at all. To be susceptible to no revival of the vivid 
emotions of youth, to be touched by no thoughts more 
intense than our own, to be accessible to no imaginative 
interpretation of the life we lead — this seems to me 
to be a heavy misfortune. But to possess, as most 
of us do, our share of all these qualities, and then at 
no time, in no fitting mood or proffered opportunity, 
to read poetry — this can only be regarded as deafness 
by habit and blindness from choice. 



Eye, Ear, and Mind 

Our eyes are more civilized than our ears, and much 
more civilized than our minds; that is the flat truth, 
and it accounts for a good deal that puzzles worthy- 
people who wish to reform literature. 

Consider the musical comedy of the kind that runs 
for a year and costs the price of two books for a good 
seat. Its humor is either good horseplay or vulgar 
farce, and its literary quality nil. Its music is better, 
less banal than the words, and, sometimes, almost ex- 
cellent. But its setting, the costumes, the scenic effects, 
the stage painting, and, most of all, the color schemes 
are always artistic and sometimes exquisite. They 
intrigue the most sophisticated taste, which is not sur- 
prising; yet, at the same time, the multitude likes them, 
pays for them, stays away if they are not right. Eye is 
an esthete, ear is, at least, cultivated, mind is a gross 
barbarian, unwilling to think, and desirous only of a 
tickle or a prod. 

Or to localize the scene and change the angle a trifle, 
compare the New York ear for music with the New 
York taste for reading. The audiences who hear 
good concerts, good operas, good oratorios, and thor- 
oughly appreciate them, far outrun in number the read- 
ers of equally artistic or intellectual books. Ear is 

243 



244 Philistines and Dilettante 

more cultivated than mind, musical appreciation keener 
than literary taste. A good stage set on a first night 
in this same metropolis of the arts, will get a round of 
applause, when not only often, but usually, perfection 
of lines, or poignancy of thought in the dialogue, will 
miss praise altogether. Eye detects sheer beauty in- 
stantly, mind lags or is dull to it. 

This is a fact; the cause of it let psychologists ex- 
plain, as they can, of course, very readily. It is a 
rather encouraging fact, for it seems to indicate that 
our members educate themselves one at a time, and yet, 
as parts of a single body corporate, must help each 
other's education. If we grow critical of the sped-up 
background of a movie scene, we may grow critical of 
its sped-up plot. Eye may teach the ear, ear lift the 
mind to more strenuous intellectual efforts. 

And, of course, it explains why the literary reformers 
have such difficulties with the multitude. Why, they 
say, do these women, whose dress is admirably de- 
signed and colored, whose living rooms are propor- 
tioned and furnished in taste, who know good music 
from bad, and enjoy the former — ^why do they read 
novels without the least distinction, without beauty 
or truth, barely raised above vulgarity? Why, they 
say, does this man who cooperates with his architect 
in the building of a country house which would have 
been a credit to any period, who is a connoisseur in 
wine and cigars, and unerring in his judgment of pic- 
tures, why does he definitely prefer the commonplace 
in literature? Eye, ear, and tongue are civilized; in- 



Eye, Ear, and Mind 245 

tellect remains a gross feeder still. Good reading comes 
last among the arts of taste. 

This is not an essay in reform; it is content to be 
a question mark; but one bit of preaching may slip 
in at the end. Why give eye and ear all the fine ex- 
periences? Why not do something for poor, slovenly 
mind? The truth is that we are lazy. In a stage full 
of shimmering beauty, in a concert of chamber music, 
in a fine building, or an admirable sketch, others do 
the work, we have only to gaze or listen in order to 
pluck some, at least, of the fruits of art. But fine 
novels take fine reading; fine essays take fine thinking; 
fine poetry takes fine feeling. We balk at the effort, 
and ask, like the audience at the movies, that eye 
should take the easier way. And hence the American 
reader still faintly suggests the Fiji Islander, who wears 
a silk hat and patent leathers on a tattooed naked body. 

For all we can tell, that may be the direction of 
Progress. In 2021 New Yorkers may be gazing at a 
city beautiful, where even the subways give forth sweet 
sounds; and reading novelized movies in words of one 
syllable. Eye may win the race and starve out the 
other members. It would be a bad future for pub- 
lishers and authors; and I am against it, even as a pos- 
sibility. Hence my energies will be devoted to poking, 
thrilling, energizing, tonicking that lazy old organism, 
half asleep still — Mind. 



Out with the Dilettante 

A FEW years ago drums and trumpets in American 
magazines and publishers' advertisements announced 
that the essay was coming to its own again. We were 
to vary our diet of short stories with pleasing disqui- 
sitions, to find in books of essays a substitute for the 
volume of sermons grown obsolete, and to titillate 
our finer senses by graceful prose that should teach 
us without didacticism, and present contemporary life 
without the incumbrance of a plot. 

The promise was welcome. American literature has 
been at its very best in the essay. In the essay, with 
few exceptions, it has more often than elsewhere 
attained world-wide estimation. Emerson, Thoreau, 
Oliver Wendell Holmes were primarily essayists. Haw- 
thorne and Irving were essayists as much as romancers. 
Franklin was a common sense essayist. Jonathan Ed- 
wards will some day be presented (by excerpt) as a 
moral essayist of a high order. And there was Lowell. 

Have they had worthy successors? In the years 
after the Civil War certainly none of equal eminence. 
But it is too early to say that the trumpets and drums 
of the last decade were false heralds. The brilliant 
epithets of Chesterton, the perfect sophistication of 
Pearsall Smith (an American, but expatriated), the 
placid depth of Hudson's nature studies, are not paral- 

246 



Out with the Dilettante 247 

leled on this side of the water, yet with Crothers, 
Gerould, Repplier, Colby, Morley, Strunsky, we need 
not fear comparison in the critical genre, unless it be 
with the incomparable Max Beerbohm. 

Two kinds of expository writing are natural for 
Americans. The first is a hard-hitting statement, 
straight out of intense feeling or labored thought. That 
was Emerson's way (in spite of his expansiveness), 
and Thoreau's also. You read them by pithy sentences, 
not paragraphs. They assail you by ideas, not by in- 
sidious structures of thought. The second is an easy- 
going comment on life, often slangy or colloquial and 
frequently so undignified as not to seem literature. 
Mark Twain and Josh Billings wrote that way; Ring 
Lardner writes so to-day. 

When the straight-from-the-shoulder American takes 
time to finish his thought, to mold his sentences, to 
brain his reader with a perfect expression of his tense 
emotion, then he makes literature. And when the easy- 
going humorist, often nowadays a column conductor, 
or a contributor to The Saturday Evening Post, takes 
time to deepen his observation and to say it with real 
words instead of worn symbols, he makes, and does 
make, literature. More are doing it than the skeptical 
realize. The new epoch of the American essay is well 
under way. 

But the desire to "make literature" in America is 
too often wasted. The would-be essayist wastes it in 
pretty writing about trivial things — neighbors' back 
yards, books I have read, the idiosyncrasies of cats, 



248 Philistines and Dilettante 

humors of the streets — the sort of dilettantish comment 
that older nations writing of more settled, richer civili- 
zations can do well — that Anatole France and occa- 
sional essayists of Punch or The Spectator can do well 
and most of us do indifferently. We are a humorous 
people, but not a playful one. Light irony is not our 
forte. Strength and humorous exaggeration come more 
readily to our pens than grace. We are better inspired 
by the follies of the crowd, or the errors of humanity, 
than by the whims of culture or aspects of pleasant 
leisure. And when we try to put on style in the manner 
of Lamb or Hazlitt, Stevenson or Beerbohm, we seldom 
exceed the second rate. 

When the newspaper and magazine humorists of 
democracy learn to write better; when the moralists 
and reformers and critics of American life learn to 
mature and perfect their thought until what they write 
is as good as their intentions^ — then the trumpets and 
drums may sound again, and with justification. Many 
have; may others follow. 

And perhaps then we can scrap a mass of fine writing 
about nothing in particular, that calls itself the Ameri- 
can literary essay, and yet is neither American in in- 
spiration, native in style, nor good for anything what- 
soever, except exercise in words. Out with the dilet- 
tantes. We are tired of the merely literary; we want 
real literature in the essay as elsewhere. 



Flat Prose 

Some time ago a writer protested against the taboo 
on "beautiful prose." He asserted that the usual or- 
gans of publication, especially in America, reject with 
deadly certainty all contributions whose style suggests 
that melodious rhythm which De Quincey and Ruskin 
made fashionable for their generations, and Stevenson 
revived in the 'nineties. He complained that the writer 
is no longer allowed to write as well as he can; that 
he must abstract all unnecessary color of phrase, all 
warmth of connotation and grace of rhythm from his 
style, lest he should seem to be striving for "atmos- 
phere," instead of going about his proper business, 
which is to fill the greedy stomach of the public with 
facts. 

Unfortunately, this timely fighter in a good cause 
was too enamored of the art whose suppression he was 
bewailing. He so far forgot himself as to make his 
own style "beautiful" in the old-time fashion, and thus 
must have roused the prejudice of the multitude, who 
had to study such style in college, and knew from sad 
experience that it takes longer to read than the other 
kind. 

But there are other and safer ways of combating 
the taste for flat prose. One might be to print parallel 
columns of "newspaper English" (which they threaten 

249 



2^0 Philistines and Dilettante 

now to teach in the schools) until the eye sickened of 
its deadly monotony. This is a bad way. The average 
reader would not see the point. Paragraphs from a 
dozen American papers, all couched in the same utili- 
tarian dialect, — simple but not always clear, concise 
yet seldom accurate, emphatic but as ugly as the clank 
of an automobile chain, — why, we read thousands of 
such lines daily! We think in such English; we talk 
in it; to revolt from this style, to which the Associated 
Press has given the largest circulation on record, would 
be like protesting against the nitrogen in our air. 

Books and magazines require a different reckoning. 
The author is still allowed to let himself go occasionally 
in books — especially in sentimental books. But the 
magazines, with few exceptions, have shut down the lid, 
and are keeping the stylistic afflatus under strict com- 
pression. No use to show them what they might pub- 
lish if, with due exclusion of the merely pretty, the 
sing-song, and the weakly ornate, they were willing to 
let a little style escape. With complete cowardice, they 
will turn the general into the particular, and insist 
that in any case they will not publish you. Far better, 
it seems to me, to warn editors and the "practical pub- 
lic" as to what apparently is going to happen if ambi- 
tious authors are tied down much longer to flat prose. 

It is not generally known, I believe, that post-im- 
pressionism has escaped from the field of pictorial art, 
and is running rampant in literature. At present, Miss 
Gertrude Stein is the chief culprit. Indeed, she may 
be called the founder of a coterie, if not of a school. 



Flat Prose 251 

Her art has been defined recently by one of her 
admirers, who is also the subject, or victim, of the 
word-portrait from which I intend later to quote in 
illustration of my argument. "Gertrude Stein," says 
Miss Dodge, "is doing with words what Picasso is do- 
ing with paint. She is impelling language to induce 
new states of consciousness, and in doing so language 
becomes with her a creative art rather than a mirror 
of history." This, being written in psychological and 
not in post-impressionist English, is fairly intelligible. 
But it does not touch the root of the matter. Miss 
Stein, the writer continues, uses "words that appeal to 
her as having the meaning they seem to have [that is, 
if "diuturnity" suggests a tumble downstairs, it means 
a tumble downstairs] . To present her impressions she 
chooses words for their inherent quality rather than 
their accepted meaning." 

Let us watch the creative artist at her toil. The 
title of this particular word-picture is "Portrait of 
Mabel Dodge at the Villa Curonia." As the portrait 
itself has a beginning, but no middle, and only a faintly 
indicated end, I believe — though in my ignorance of just 
what it all means I am not sure — that I can quote at 
random without offense to the impressions derivable 
from the text. 

Here then are a few paragraphs where the inherent 
quality of the words is said to induce new states of 
consciousness: — 

"Bargaining is something and there is not that suc- 
cess. The intention is what if application has that 



2^2 Philistines and Dilettante 

accident results are reappearing. They did not darken. 
That was not an adulteration. . . . There is that par- 
ticular half of directing that there is that particular 
whole direction that is not all the measure of any com- 
bination. Gliding is not heavily moving. Looking is 
not vanishing. Laughing is not evaporation. 

"Praying has intention and relieving that situation 
is not solemn. There comes that way. 

"There is all there is when there has all there has 
where there is what there is. That is what is done 
when there is done what is done and the union is won 
and the division is the explicit visit. There is not all 
of any visit." 

After a hundred lines of this I wish to scream, I 
wish to burn the book, I am in agony. It is not be- 
cause I know that words cannot be torn loose from 
their meanings without insulting the intellect. It is 
not because I see that this is a prime example of the 
"confusion of the arts." No, my feeling is purely phys- 
ical. Some one has applied an egg-beater to my brain. 

But having calmed myself by a sedative of flat prose 
from the paper, I realize that Miss Stein is more sinned 
against than sinning. She is merely a red flag waved 
by the Zeitgeist, 

For this is the sort of thing we are bound to get if 
the lid is kept down on the stylists much longer. Re- 
pression has always bred revolt. Revolt breeds ex- 
travagance. And extravagance leads to absurdity. 
And yet even in the absurd, a sympathetic observer 
may detect a purpose which is honest and right. Miss 



Flat Prose 253 

Stein has indubitably written nonsense, but she began 
with sense. For words have their sound-values as 
well as their sense- values, and prose rhythms do convey 
to the mind emotions that mere denotation cannot give. 
Rewrite the solemn glory of Old Testament diction 
in the flat colorless prose which just now is demanded, 
and wonder at the difference. Translate ^'the multi- 
tudinous seas incarnadine'^ into "making the ocean 
red," — or, for more pertinent instances, imagine a Car- 
lyle, an Emerson, a Lamb forced to exclude from his 
vocabulary every word not readily understood by the 
multitude, to iron out all whimseys, all melodies from 
his phrasing, and to plunk down his words one after 
the other in the order of elementary thought 1 

I am willing to fight to the last drop of ink against 
any attempt to bring back ''fine writing" and ornate 
rhetoric into prose. "Expression is the dress of 
thought," and plain thinking and plain facts look best 
in simple clothing. Nevertheless, if we must write 
our stories, our essays, our novels, and (who knows) 
our poems in the flat prose of the news colunm, — if the 
editors will sit on the lid, — ^well, the public will get 
what it pays for, but sooner or later the spirit of style 
will ferment, will work, will grow violent under re- 
straint. There will be reaction, explosion, revolution. 
The public will get its flat prose, and — in addition — not 
one, but a hundred Gertrude Steins. 



VI 

Men and Their Books 



m 



Conrad and Melville 

The appearance of the definitive edition of Joseph 
Conrad, with his interesting critical prefaces included, 
was a provocation to read and reread his remarkable 
series of books, the most remarkable contribution to 
English literature by an alien since the language began. 
But is it a reason for writing more of an author already 
more discussed than any English stylist of our time? 
For myself, I answer, yes, because I have found no ade- 
quate definition of the difference between Conrad and 
us to whom English thinking is native, nor a definition 
of his place, historically considered, in the modern 
scheme; no definition, that is, which explains my own 
impressions of Conrad. And therefore I shall proceed, 
as all readers should, to make my own. 

If you ask readers why they like Conrad, two out 
of three will answer, because he is a great stylist, or 
because he writes of the sea. I doubt the worth of 
such answers. Many buy books because they are 
written by great stylists, but few read for just that 
reason. They read because there is something in an 
author's work which attracts them to his style, and 
that something may be study of character, skill in nar- 
rative, or profundity in truth, of which style is the 
perfect expression, but not the thing itself. Only con- 

257 



258 Men and Their Books 

noisseurs, and few of them, read for style. And, fur- 
thermore, I very much doubt whether readers go to 
Conrad to learn about the sea. They might learn as 
much from Cooper or Melville, but they have not gone 
there much of late. And many an ardent lover of 
Conrad would rather be whipped than go from New 
York to Liverpool on a square-rigged ship. 

In any case, these answers, which make up the sum 
of most writing about Conrad, do not define him. To 
say that an author is a stylist is about as helpful as 
to say that he is a thinker. And Conrad would have 
had his reputation if he had migrated to Kansas instead 
of to the English sea. 

Tn point of fact, much may be said, and with justice, 
against Conrad's style. It misses occasionally the Eng- 
lish idiom, and sometimes English grammar, which is 
a trivial criticism. It offends more frequently against 
the literary virtues of conciseness and economy, which 
is not a trivial criticism. Conrad, like the writers of 
Elizabethan prose (whom he resembles in ardency and 
in freshness), too often wraps you in words, stupefies 
you with gorgeous repetition, goes about and about and 
about, trailing phrases after him, while the procession 
of narrative images halts. He can be as prolix in his 
brooding descriptions as Meredith with his intellectual 
vaudeville. Indeed, many give him lip service solely 
because they like to be intoxicated, to be carried away, 
by words. A slight change of taste, such as that which 
has come about since Meredith was on every one's 
tongue, will make such defects manifest. Meredith lives 



Conrad and Melville 259 

in spite of his prolixities, and so will Conrad, but neither 
because they are perfect English stylists. 

I am sure also that Conrad, at his very best, is not 
so good as Melville, at his best, in nautical narrative; 
as Melville in, say, the first day of the final chase 
of Moby Dick; I question whether he is as good in 
sea narrative as Cooper in the famous passage of Paul 
Jones's ship through the shoals. Such comparisons are, 
of course, rather futile. They differentiate among ex- 
cellences, where taste is a factor. Nevertheless, it is 
belittling to a man who, above almost all others in our 
language, has brooded upon the mysteries of the mind's 
action, to say that he is great because he describes so 
well the sea. 

We must seek elsewhere for a definition of the pecul- 
iar qualities of Conrad. And without a definition it is 
easy to admire but hard to estimate and understand 
him. 

I believe, first of all, that Conrad has remained 
much more a Slav than he, or any of us, have been 
willing to admit. A friend of mine, married to a Slav, 
told me of her husband, how, with his cab at the door, 
and dinner waiting somewhere, he would sit brooding 
(so he said) over the wrongs of his race. It is danger- 
ous to generalize in racial characteristics, but no one 
will dispute a tendency to brood as a characteristic 
of the Slav. The Russian novels are full of characters 
who brood, and of brooding upon the characters and 
their fates. The structure of the Russian story is deter- 
mined not by events so much as by the results of pas- 



26o Men and Their Books 

sionate brooding upon the situation in which the imag- 
ined characters find themselves. 

So it is with Conrad, always and everywhere. In 
"Nostromo" he broods upon the destructive power of 
a fixed idea; in "The Rescue" upon the result of fling- 
ing together elemental characters of the kind that life 
keeps separate; in "Youth" upon the illusions, more 
real than reality, of youth. No writer of our race had 
ever the patience to sit like an Eastern mystic over 
his scene, letting his eye fill with each slightest detail 
of it, feeling its contours around and above and be- 
neath, separating each detail of wind and water, mood 
and emotion, memory and hope, and returning again 
and again to the task of description, until every im- 
pression was gathered, every strand of motive threaded 
to its source. 

Henry James, you will say, was even more patient. 
Yes, but James did not brood. His work was active 
analysis, cutting finer and finer until the atom was 
reached. His mind was Occidental. He wished to 
know why the wheels went round. Conrad's, in this 
respect, is Oriental. He wants to see what things essen- 
tially are. Henry James refines but seldom repeats. 
Conrad, in such a story as "Caspar Ruiz" for example, 
or in "Chance," gives the impression of not caring to 
understand if only he can fully picture the mind that 
his brooding imagination draws further and further 
from its sheath. It is incredible, to one who has not 
counted, how many times he raises the same situation 
to the light — the Garibaldean and Nostromo, Mrs. 



Conrad and Melville 261 

Travers marveling at her knowledge of Lingard's heart 
— turns it, opens it a little further, and puts it back 
while he broods on. Here is the explanation of Con- 
rad's prolixity; here the reason why among all living 
novelists he is least a slave to incident, best able to 
let his story grow as slowly as life, and still hold the 
reader's interest. As we read Conrad we also brood; 
we read slowly where elsewhere we read fast. Turns 
of style, felicities of description, as of the tropic ocean, 
or the faces of women, have their chance. And, of 
course, the excellence, the charm of Conrad's style is 
that in its nuances, its slow winding paragraphs, its 
pausing sentences, and constant suggestion of depths 
beyond depths, it is the perfect expression of the brood- 
ing mind that grasps its meaning by the repetition of 
images that drop like pebbles, now here, now there, 
in a fathomless pool. 

This is to define Conrad in space, but not in time. 
In time, he may be Slav or English, but certainly is 
modern of the moderns. The tribute of admiration 
and imitation from the youth of his own period alone 
might prove this. But it is easier to prove than to 
describe his modernity. To say that he takes the imag- 
ination afield into the margins of the world, where life 
still escapes standardization and there are fresh aspects 
of beauty, is to fail to differentiate him from Kipling 
or Masefield. To say that he strikes below the act 
and the will into realms of the sub-conscious, and 
studies the mechanism as well as the results of emotion, 
is but to place him, where indeed he belongs, among 



262 Men and Their Books 

the many writers who have learned of Henry James or 
moved in parallels beside him. 

To get a better perspective of Conrad's essential 
modernity I should like to propose a more cogent com- 
parison, and a more illuminating contrast, with a man 
whose achievements were in Conrad's own province, 
who challenges and rewards comparison, Herman Mel- 
ville. 

It may be that others have set "Moby Dick" beside 
the works of Conrad. Some one must have done it, 
so illuminating in both directions is the result. Here 
are two dreamers who write of the sea and strange 
men, of the wild elements and the mysterious in man; 
two authors who, a half century apart, sail the same 
seas and come home to write not so much of them 
as what they dream when they remember their ex- 
periences. Each man, as he writes, transcends the sea, 
sublimates it into a vapor of pure imagination^ in which 
he clothes his idea of man, and so doing gives us not 
merely great literature, but sea narrative and descrip- 
tion unsurpassed: 

And thus, through the serene tranquillities of the tropical 
seas, among waves whose hand-clappings were suspended by 
exceeding rapture, Moby Dick moved on, still withholding 
from sight the full terrors of his submerged trunk, entirely 
hiding the wretched hideousness of his jaw. 

Melville, writer of vivid descriptions of the South 
Seas, "Typee," "Omoo," which were perfect of their 



Conrad and Melville 263 

kind, but still only superlative travel books, distin- 
guished in style but seldom lifting beyond autobiog- 
raphy, began another reminiscent narrative in '^Moby 
Dick." In spite of his profound intellectual growth 
away from the cool and humorous youth who paddled 
the Marquesan lake with primitive beauties beside him, 
he seems to have meant in "The White Whale" to go 
back to his earlier manner, to write an accurate though 
highly personal account of the whaler's life, and to 
that end had assembled a mass of information upon 
the sperm whale to add to his own memories. Very 
literally the story begins as an autobiography; even 
the elemental figure of the cannibal, Queequeg, with 
his incongruous idol and harpoon in a New Bedford 
lodging house, does not warn of what is to come. But 
even before the Pequod leaves sane Nantucket an un- 
dercurrent begins to sweep through the narrative. 
This brooding captain, Ahab (for Melville also broods, 
though with characteristic difference), and his ivory 
leg, those warning voices in the mist, the strange crew 
of all races and temperaments — the civilized, the bar- 
barous, and the savage — in their ship, which is a micro- 
cosm, hints that creep in of the white whale whose 
nature is inimical to man and arouses passions deeper 
than gain or revenge — all this prepares the reader for 
something more than incident. From the mood of 
Defoe one passes, by jerks and reversions, to the at- 
mosphere of "The Ancient Mariner" and of "Man- 
fred." 
When Conrad could not manage his story he laid 



264 Men and Their Books 



^ 



it aside, sometimes for twenty years, as with "The 
Rescue." But Melville was a wilder soul, a greater 
man, and probably a greater artist, but a lesser crafts- 
man. He lost control of his book. He loaded his 
whaling story with casks of natural history, deck loaded 
it with essays on the moral nature of man, lashed to 
its sides dramatic dialogues on the soul, built up a 
superstructure of symbolism and allegory, until the 
tale foundered and went down, like the Pequod. And 
then it emerged again a dream ship searching for a 
dream whale, manned by fantastic and terrible dreams ; 
and every now and then, as dreams will, it takes on an 
appearance of reality more vivid than anything in life, 
more real than anything in Conrad — the meeting with 
the Rachel and her captain seeking his drowned son, 
the rising of Moby Dick with the dead Parsee bound 
to his terrible flank, the grim dialogues of Ahab. . . . 
In this bursting of bounds, in these epic grandeurs 
in the midst of confusion, and vivid realities mingled 
with untrammeled speculation, lies the secret of Mel- 
ville's purpose, and, by contrast, the explanation of 
Conrad's modern effect beside him. Melville, friend 
of Hawthorne and transcendentalist philosopher on his 
own account, sees nature as greater and more terrible 
than man. He sees the will of man trying to control 
the universe, but failing; crushed if uncowed by the 
unmeasured power of an evil nature, which his little 
spirit, once it loses touch with the will of God, vainly 
encounters. Give man eyes only in the top of his head, 
looking heavenward, says Ahab, urging the blacksmith, 



Conrad and Melville 265 

who makes him a new leg buckle, to forge a new 
creature complete. He writes of man at the beginning 
of the age of science, aware of the vast powers of 
material nature, fretting that his own body is part of 
them, desirous to control them by mere will, fighting 
his own moral nature as did Ahab in his insensate 
pursuit of Moby Dick, and destroyed by his own am- 
bitions, even as Ahab, the Pequod, and all her crew 
went down before the lashings and charges of the 
white whale. 

"Oh, Life," says Ahab, "here I am^ proud as a Greek 
god, and yet standing debtor to this blockhead [the 
carpenter] for a bone to stand on! ... I owe for the 
flesh in the tongue I brag with." And yet as they 
approach the final waters "the old man's purpose in- 
tensified itself. His firm lips met like the lips of a vise; 
the Delta of his forehead's veins swelled like overladen 
brooks; in his very sleep his ringing cry ran through 
the vaulted hull: 'Stern all! The white whale spouts 
thick blood!'" 

Conrad comes at the height of the age of science. 
The seas for him are full of dark mysteries, but these 
mysteries are only the reflections of man. Man domi- 
nates the earth and sea, man conquers the t5;phoon, 
intelligent man subdues the savage wills of the bar- 
barians of the shallows, man has learned to master all 
but his own heart. The center of gravity shifts from 
without to within. The philosopher, reasoning of God 
and of nature, gives place to the psychologist brood- 
ing over an organism that is seat of God and master 



266 Men and Their Books 

of the elements. Melville is centrifugal, Conrad cen- 
tripetal. Melville's theme is too great for him; it 
breaks his story, but the fragments are magnificent. 
Conrad's task is easier because it is more limited; his 
theme is always in control. He broods over man in a 
world where nature has been conquered, although the 
mind still remains inexplicable. The emphasis shifts 
from external symbols of the immensities of good and 
evil to the behavior of personality under stress. Mel- 
ville is a moral philosopher, Conrad a speculative psy- 
chologist. 

The essentially modern quality of Conrad lies in 
this transference of wonder from nature to the be- 
havior of man, the modern man for whom lightning is 
only electricity and wind the relief of pressure from 
hemisphere to hemisphere. Mystery lies in the per- 
sonality now, not in the blind forces that shape and 
are shaped by it. It is the difference, in a sense, be- 
tween Hawthorne, who saw the world as shadow and 
illusion, symbolizing forces inimical to humanity, and 
Hardy, who sees in external nature the grim scientific 
fact of environment. It is a difference between eras 
more marked in Conrad than in many of his contem- 
poraries, because, like Melville, Hawthorne, and Poe, 
he avoids the plain prose of realism and sets his ro- 
mantic heroes against the great powers of nature — 
tempests, the earthquake, solitude, and grandeur. Thus 
the contrast is marked by the very resemblance of 
romantic setting. For Conrad's tempests blow only 
to beat upon the mind whose behavior he is studying; 



Conrad and Melville 267 

his moral problems are raised only that he may study 
their effect upon man. 

If, then, we are to estimate Conrad's work, let us 
begin by defining him in these terms. He is a Slav 
who broods by racial habit as well as by necessity of 
his theme. He is a modern who accepts the growing 
control of physical forces by the intellect and turns 
from the mystery of nature to brood upon personality. 
From this personality he makes his stories. External 
nature bulks large in them, because it is when beat 
upon by adversity, brought face to face with the ele- 
mental powers, and driven into strange efforts of will 
by the storms without that man's personality reaches 
the tensest pitch. Plot of itself means little to Conrad 
and that is why so few can tell with accuracy the stories 
of his longer novels. His characters are concrete. 
They are not symbols of the moral nature, like Mel- 
ville's men, but they are nevertheless phases of per- 
sonality and therefore they shift and dim_ from story 
to story, like lanterns in a wood. Knowing their hearts 
to the uttermost, and even their gestures, one neverthe- 
less forgets sometimes their names, the ends to which 
they come, the tales in which they appear. The same 
phase, indeed, appears under different names in several 
stories. 

Melville crossed the shadow line in his pursuit of 
the secret of man's relation to the universe; only mag- 
nificent fragments of his imagination were salvaged 
for his books. Conrad sails on an open sea, tamed by 
wireless and conquered by steel. Mystery for him lies 



268 Men and Their Books 

not beyond the horizon, but in his fellow passengers. 
On them he broods. His achievement is more complete 
than Melville's; his scope is less. When the physicists 
have resolved, as apparently they soon will do, this 
earthy matter where now with our implements and our 
machinery we are so much at home, into mysterious 
force as intangible as will and moral desire, some new 
transcendental novelist will assume Melville's task. 
The sea, earth, and sky, and the creatures moving 
therein again will become symbols, and the pursuit of 
Moby Dick be renewed. But now, for a while, science 
has pushed back the unknown to the horizon and given 
us a little space of light in the darkness of the universe. 
There the ego is for a time the greatest mystery. It is 
an opportunity for the psychologists and, while we 
are thinking less of the soul, they have rushed to study 
the mechanics of the brain. It was Conrad's oppor- 
tunity also to brood upon the romance of personality 
at the moment of man's greatest victory over dark ex- 
ternal force. 



The Novelist of Pity 

To those interested in the meaning of the generation 
that has now left us quivering on the beach of after 
war, Thomas Hardy's books are so engrossing that to 
write of them needs no pretext; yet the recent publica- 
tion of an anniversary edition with all his prefaces in- 
cluded is a welcome excuse for what I propose to make, 
not so much an essay as a record of a sudden under- 
standing. Long familiarity with Hardy's novels had 
led to an afternoon of conversation with the author 
himself in the mildness of old age. But he remained 
for me a still inexplicable figure, belonging to an earlier 
century, yet in other respects so clearly abreast, if not 
ahead, of the emotions of our own times, that at eighty 
he saw the young men beginning to follow him. It was 
a reading of "The Dynasts," in the tall, red volumes of 
the new edition, that suddenly and unexpectedly 
seemed to give me a key. 

The danger, so I had thought and think, is that 
Hardy bids fair to become a legendary figure with an 
attribute, as is the way with such figures, better known 
than the man himself. "Hardy, oh, yes, the pessimist" 
threatens to become all the schoolboy knows and all 
he needs to know of him, and his alleged philosophy 
of gloom is already overshadowing the man's intense 
interest in strong and appealing life. It has been the 

269 



270 Men and Their Books 

fate of many a great artist to get a nickname, like a 
boy, and never be rid of it. 

I do not wish by any ingenious fabrication to prove 
that Hardy was not a pessimist. He is the father of 
the English school that refuse to be either deists or 
moralists, and, like them, pushes his stories to an end 
that is often bitter. His temperament is cast in that 
brooding, reflective mood that concerns itself less 
readily with jollity than with grief, and is therefore ever 
slanting toward pessimism. This, even his style indi- 
cates. Like the somber Hawthorne's, his style is brood- 
ing, adumbrative, rather than incisive or brilliant, and 
it often limps among the facts of his story like a man 
in pain. Indeed, Hardy is seldom a stylist, except when 
his mood is somber; therefore it is by his sadder 
passages that we remember him. Yet the most impor- 
tant fact about Hardy is not that he is pessimistic. 

His manner of telling a story, however, helps to con- 
firm the popular impression. Hardy's plots are a series 
of accidents, by which the doom of some lovely or 
aspiring spirit comes upon it by the slow drift of mis- 
fortune. Tess, Grace, Eustacia, Jude — it is clear 
enough to what joys and sorrows their natures make 
them liable. But the master prepares for them trivial 
error, unhappy coincidence, unnecessary misfortune, 
until it is not surprising if the analytic mind insists 
that he is laboring some thesis of pessimism to be 
worked out by concrete example. 

Nevertheless, this is incomplete definition, and it is 
annoying that the dean of letters in our tongue should 



The Novelist of Pity 271 

be subjected to a sophomoric formula in which the em- 
phasis is wrongly placed. The critics, in general, have 
defined this pessimism, stopped there, and said, this is 
Hardy. But youth that does not like pessimism reads 
Hardy avidly. More light is needed. 

Mr. Hardy himself does not suggest the simple and 
melancholy pessimist. A mild old man, gentleness is 
the first quality one feels in him, but at eighty he still 
waxed his mustache tips, and his eyes lit eagerly. I 
remember how earnestly he denied knowledge of sci- 
ence, piqued, I suppose, by the omniscient who had 
declared that his art consisted of applying the results 
of scientific inquiry to the study of simple human 
nature. If his treatment of nature was scientific, as I 
affirmed, his wife agreed, and he did not deny, then, 
he implied, his knowledge came by intuition, not by 
theory. The war was still on when I talked with him. 
It had Hfted him to poetry at first, but by 1918 no 
longer interested him vitally. "It is too mechanical," 
he said. His novels, where fate seems to operate me- 
chanically sometimes, he was willing that day to set 
aside as nil. Poetry, he thought, was the only proper 
form of expression. The novel was too indirect; too 
wasteful of time and space in its attempt to come at 
real issues. Yet these real issues, it appeared as we 
talked, were not theories. Ideas, he said, if empha- 
sized, destroy art. Writers, he thought, in the future 
would give up pure fiction (serious writers, I suppose 
he meant). Poetry would be their shorthand; they 
would by intenser language cut short to their end. 



272 Men and Their Books 

What was his end? Not mechanical, scientific 
theories, that was clear. Not mere realistic descrip- 
tion of life. He told me he had little faith in mere ob- 
servation, except for comic or quaint characterization. 
He had seldom if ever studied a serious character from 
a model. One woman he invented entirely (was it 
Tess?) and she was thought to be his best. What, 
then, was this essence which the novelist, growing old, 
would convey now in concentrated form by poetry 
which to him, so he said, was story-telling in verse. 

It is easier to understand what he meant if one 
thinks how definitely Hardy belongs to his age, the lat- 
ter nineteenth century, in spite of his reachings for- 
ward. On the one hand, his very gentleness is charac- 
teristic of a period that was above all others humane. 
On the other, his somber moods sprang from a genera- 
tion that was the first to understand the implications 
of the struggle for life in the animal world all about 
them. They, to be sure, deduced from what they saw 
a vague theory of evolution in which the best (who 
were themselves) somehow were to come out best in 
the end. He, though gentle as they were, deduced 
nothing so cheerful, saw rather the terrible discrepan- 
cies between fact and theory, so that his very gentle- 
ness made him pessimistic, where Browning was op^ 
timistic. Then, like Hawthorne in the generation be- 
fore him, Hardy went back to an earlier, simpler life 
than his own, and there made his inquiries. Haw- 
thorne, who did not accept the theology of Puritanism, 
was yet strangely troubled by the problem of sin. 



The Novelist of Pity 273 

Hardy, accepting the implacability of evolution with- 
out its easy optimism, was intensely moved to pity. 
This is his open secret. 

The clearest statement is in his poetry, where again 
and again, in our conversation that day, he seemed to 
be placing it — most of all, I think, in ''The Dynasts." 

"The Dynasts" was published too soon. We Eng- 
lish speakers, in 1 904-1 906, were beginning to read 
plays again, under the stimulus of a dramatic revival, 
and the plays we read were successful on the stage. 
As I recollect the criticism of "The Dynasts," much 
of it at least was busied with the form of the drama, 
its great length and unwieldiness. We thought of it 
not as a dramatic epic, but as a dramatized novel — a 
mistake. We thought that Hardy was taking the long 
way around, when in truth he had found a short cut 
to his issues. That "The Dynasts," considering the 
vastness of its Napoleonic subject, was far more con- 
cise, more direct, clearer than his novels, did not be- 
come manifest, although the sharper-eyed may have 
seen it. 

In "The Dynasts" I find all of Hardy. The Im- 
manent Will is God, as Hardy conceives Him, neither 
rational nor entirely conscious, frustrating His own 
seeming ends, without irony and without compassion, 
and yet perhaps evolving like His world, clearing like 
men's visions, moving towards consistency. The Sin- 
ister Angel and the Ironic Angel are moods well known 
to Hardy, but not loved by him. The Spirit of the 
Years that sees how poor human nature collides with 



274 Men and Their Books 

accident, or the inevitable, and is bruised, is Hardy's 
reasoned philosophy. The Spirit of Pities (not always, 
as he says, logical or consistent) is Hardy's own desire, 
his will, his faint but deep-felt hope. I quote, from the 
very end of the great spectacle, some lines in which the 
Spirits, who have watched the confused tragedy of the 
Napoleonic age, sum up their thoughts: 

AFTER SCENE 

Spirit of the Years 

Thus doth the Great Foresightless mechanize 
Its blank entrancement now as evermore 
Its ceaseless artistries in circumstance. . . . 
Yet seems this vast and singular confection 
Wherein our scenery glints of scantest size, 
Inutile all — so far as reasonings tell. 

Spirit of Pities 

Thou arguest still the Inadvertent Mind. — 
But, even so, shall blankness be for aye? . . . 

Spirit of the Years 
What wouldst have hoped and had the Will to be? . . . 

Semi-chorus I of the Pities 

Nay; — shall not Its blindness break? 
Yea, must not Its heart awake, 

Promptly tending 

To Its mending i 

In a genial germing purpose, and for loving-kindness' sake? | 



The Novelist of Pity 275 

Semi-chorus II 

Should It never 
Curb or cure 
Aught whatever 
Those endure 
Whom It quickens, let them darkle to extinction swift and 
sure. 

Chorus 

But — a stirring thrills the air 
Like to sounds of joyance there 
That the rages 
Of the ages 
Shall be cancelled, and deliverance offered from the darts 

that were. 
Consciousness the Will informing, till It fashions all things 
fair! 

The Spirit of the Years (which is another name for 
Hardy's reflections upon life and history) planned in 
sad conviction of the "blank entrancement" of the 
Great Foresightless Will, those sad narratives in which 
innocence, as in "Tess of the d'Ubervilles," is crushed, 
or vivid personality frustrated, as in "The Return of 
the Native." It is the Spirit of Pities in Hardy which 
wrote the stories. Philosophy constructed them, but 
pity worked them out. 

The characters that Hardy loved — Grace, Marty 
South, Jude, Tess — are life, brooding, intense, poten- 
tial, and lovely, struggling against a fate which they 



276 Men and Their Books ™ 

help to draw upon themselves, but which is, neverthe- 
less, not necessary, not rational. The cruelty of this 
fate he assumes and depicts, but the stories are not 
told to describe it. It is his creatures that get the 
color, the interest; they are valuable to us, and would 
be to him, whatever the truth of his philosophy. But 
because he loves life, the living thing, even the lizard 
in the woods, he broods upon their frustrations. 

Pessimistic Hardy is, as any gentle heart would be ' 
who chose to study misfortune; yet pessimist is not 
the right term for him. Realist he is clearly, in the 
philosophic sense of one who is willing to view things 
as they are without prejudice. I seek a term for a 
mild spirit who sees clearly that the sufferer is more 
intelligible than his fate, and so is pitiful even when ; 
most ruthless in the depiction of misfortune. Pity for \ 
the individual, not despair of the race, is his motive. 1 
And pity makes his gentle style, pity makes him re- 
gardless of artifice, and gives his often clumsy novels 
an undercurrent which sweeps them beyond technical 
masterpieces whose only merit is sharpness of thought. i 
It is instructive to compare the relative fortunes of ; 
Hardy and Meredith, once always bracketed — the 
apostle of pity in comparison with the most subtle and | 
brilliant mind of his time. Hardy has outranked him. | 

Already it begins to appear that the inconsistent, ! 
half -conscious Will that was the sum and substance of i 
Hardy^s pessimism was given certain attributes of 
gloom that scarcely belonged to it. The ruthless strug- 
gle for life by which the fittest for the circumstances 1 



The Novelist of Pity 277 

of the moment, and by no means the best, survive at 
the expense of the others is no longer conceived as the 
clear law of human life. Science, with the rediscovery 
of Mendelism and its insistence upon psychological 
factors has submitted important qualifications to this 
deduction which Hardy, in common with others in- 
tellectually honest of his age, was forced to make. But 
it is not Hardy's philosophy, sound or unsound, that 
counts in his art, except in so far as it casts the plan 
of his stories, or sometimes, as in "Tess," or ^'The 
Woodlanders," gives too much play to cruel accident, 
and therefore an air of unreality to the tenser moments 
of the plots. Our critical emphasis in the past has 
been wrong. It should, to follow Hardy's own words, 
be set not upon the idea, the suggested explanation of 
misfortune, but upon the living creatures in his novels 
and poems alike. It is the characters he wrought in 
pity, and, it would appear, in hope, that make him a 
great man in our modern world, although only once 
did he pass beyond the bounds of his primitive Wessex. 
The novelist of pity and its poet, not the spokesman 
for pessimism, is the title I solicit for him. 



Henry James 

It has always surprised Europeans that Henry James, 
the most intellectual of modern novelists, should have 
been an American; for most Europeans believe, as does 
Lowes Dickinson, that we are an intelligent but an 
unintellectual race. Was the fact so surprising after 
all? The most thoroughgoing pessimists come from 
optimistic communities. Henry James, considered as 
a literary phenomenon, represented a sensitive mind's 
reaction against the obviousness of the life that one 
finds in most American ^'best sellers." I suppose that 
he reacted too far. I feel sure of it when he is so un- 
obvious that I cannot understand him. And yet every 
American writer must feel a little proud that there was 
one of our race who could make the great refusal of 
popularity, sever, with those intricate pen strokes of 
his, the bonds of interest that might have held the 
''general reader," and write just as well as he knew 
how. 

Whether his novels and short stories gained by this 
heroic "highbrowism," is another question. Certainly 
they did not always do so. To get a million of readers 
is no sure sign of greatness; but to find only thousands, 
as did Henry James in his later books, is to be deplored. 
In "Daisy Miller" and "The Bostonians" he was a pop- 
ular novelist of the best kind, a novelist who drew the 

278 



Henry James 279 

best people to be his readers. But men read "The 
Golden Bowl" and "The Wings of the Dove'' because 
they were skilful rather than because they were inter- 
esting. They were novelists' novels, like the profes- 
sional matinees that "stars" give on Tuesday aft- 
ernoons for the benefit of rivals and imitators in art. 

But to stop here would be to misunderstand totally 
the greatest craftsman that has come out of America. 
The flat truth is that Henry James was not a novelist 
at all, at least in the good, old-fashioned sense that we 
usually give to the word. He was primarily a critic; 
the greatest American critic since Poe. Sometimes he 
criticized literature with supreme success, as in his 
"Notes on Novelists" of 1914; but ordinarily he criti- 
cized life. His later novels are one-fifth story, one- 
fifth character creation, and the rest pure criticism 
of life. 

There is a curious passage in his "A Small Boy and 
Others" — the biography of the youth of William 
James and himself — telling how as a child in the hotels 
and resorts of Europe he spent his time in looking on 
at what was happening about him. He never got into 
the game very far, because he preferred to think about 
it. That is what Henry James did all his life long. He 
looked on, thought about life with that wonderfully 
keen, and subtle, and humorous mind of his, turned it 
into criticism; then fitted the results with enough plot 
to make them move, — and there was a so-called novel. 
Every one knows how in his last edition he rewrote 
some of his early stories to make them more subtle. It 



280 Men and Their Books 

would have been amusing if he had seen fit to rewrite 
them altogether as critical essays upon international 
life! I wonder how much they would have suffered by 
the change. 

This is why so many readers have been very proud 
of Henry James, and yet unable to defend him suc- 
cessfully against critics who pulled out handfuls of 
serpentine sentences from his latest novel, asking, ^'Do 
you call this fiction?" It was not fiction, not fiction 
at least as she used to be written; it was subtle, grace- 
ful, cunning analysis of life. Fiction is synthesis — 
building up, making a Becky Sharp, inventing a Meg 
Merrilies, constructing a plot. Criticism is analysis — 
taking down. Henry James was not so good at putting 
together as at taking to pieces. He was able in one art, 
but in the other he was great. 

The current tendency to make every new figure in 
world literature conform to Greatness of a recognized 
variety or be dismissed, is unfortunate and mislead- 
ing. We are to be congratulated that the greatness of 
Henry James was of a peculiar and irregular kind, a 
keen, inventing greatness, American in this if in noth- 
ing else. Unnumbered writers of the day, of whom 
Mr. Kipling is not the least eminent, have profited by 
his influence, and learned from him to give the final, 
subtle thought its final form. If that form in his own 
case was tortuous, intricate, difficult, why so was the 
thought. If it makes hard reading, his subject at least 
got hard thinking. Before you condemn that curious 
style of his — so easy to parody, so hard to imitate — 



Henry James 281 

ask whether such refinement of thought as his could 
be much more simply expressed. Sometimes he could 
have been simpler, undoubtedly; it was his fault that 
he did not care to be; but that "plain American" would 
usually have served his puipose, is certainly false. 

Henry James must yield first honors as a novelist, it 
may be, to others of his century if not of his genera- 
tion. As a writer, above all as a writer of fine, im- 
aginative criticism of the intellect as it moves through 
the complexities of modern civilization, he yields to 
no one of our time. Whether he has earned his dis- 
tinction as an American writer I do not know, although 
I am inclined to believe that he is more American than 
the critics suspect; but as a master of English, and as 
a great figure in the broad sweep of international Eng- 
lish literature, his place is secure. 



The Satiric Rage of Butler 

Samuel Butler^s "Erewhon" has passed safely into 
the earthly paradise of the so-called classics. It has 
been recommended by distinguished men of letters, re- 
printed and far more widely read than on its first ap- 
pearance; it has passed, by quotation and reference, 
into contemporary literature, and been taught in col- 
lege classes. "Erewhon Revisited," written thirty 
years after "Erewhon," is less well known. 

Mr. Moreby Acklom (whose name, let me assure 
the suspicious reader, is his own and not an Ere- 
whonian inversion), in a most informing preface to a 
new edition, makes two assertions which may serve as 
my excuse for again endeavoring to explain the fasci- 
nation for our generation of the work of Samuel Butler. 
College professors, he avers, have an antipathy for 
Samuel Butler; the chief interest of Butler, he further 
states, was in theology. Now I am a college professor 
without antipathy to Samuel Butler, with, on the con- 
trary, the warmest admiration for his sardonic genius. 
And furthermore Butler's antipathy for college pro- 
fessors, which is supposed to have drawn their fire in 
return, is based upon a ruling passion far deeper than 
his accidental interest in theology, a passion that gives 
the tone and also the key to the best of his writings 



The Satiric Rage of Butler 283 

and which brought him into conflict with the "vested 
interests" of his times. It is his passion for honest 
thinking. If Butler's mark had been theology merely, 
his books would have passed with the interest in his 
target. He would be as difficult reading to-day as 
Swift in his "Tale of a Tub." 

Like most of the great satirists of the world, Butler's 
saeva indignatio was aroused by the daily conflicts be- 
tween reason and stupidity, between candor and dis- 
ingenuousness, with all their mutations of h5^ocrisy, 
guile, deceit, and sham. In "Erewhon" it was human 
unreason, as a clever youth sees it, that he was attack- 
ing. We remember vividly the beautiful Erewhonians, 
who knew disease to be sin, but believed vice to be 
only disease. We remember the "straighteners" who 
gave moral medicine to the ethically unwell, the musi- 
cal banks, the hypothetical language, the machines that 
threatened to master men, as in the war of 1914-1918 
and in the industrial system of to-day they have mas- 
tered men and made them their slaves. There was a 
youthful vigor in "Erewhon," a joyous negligence as 
to where the blow should fall, a sense of not being re- 
sponsible for the world the author flicked with his 
lash, which saved the book from the condemnation that 
would have been its fate had the Victorians taken it 
seriously. It was an uneven book, beginning with vivid 
narrative in the best tradition of Defoe, losing itself 
finally in difficult argument, and cut short in mid- 
career. 

"Erewhon Revisited" is much better constructed. 



284 Men and Their Books 

The old craftsman has profited by his years of labor 
in the British Museum. He has a story to tell, and tells 
it, weighting it with satire judiciously, as a fisherman 
weights his set line.^ If his tale becomes unreal it is 
only when he knows the author is ready to hear the 
author in person. If the Erewhon of his first visit 
does not fit his new conception he ruthlessly changes 
it. One misses the satiric tours de force of the first 
"Erewhon." There is nothing so brilliant as the chap- 
ters on disease and machines which for fifty years since 
life has been illustrating. But "Erewhon Revisited" is 
a finished book; it has artistic unity. 

And why does Butler revisit Erewhon? Not be- 
cause he was trained as a priest and must have an ex- 
cuse to rediscuss theology, although the story of the 
book suggests this explanation. Higgs, the mysterious 
stranger of "Erewhon," who escaped by a balloon, has 
become a subject for myth. In Erewhon he is de- 
clared the child of the sun. Miracles gather about the 
supreme miracle of his air-born departure. His "Say- 
ings," a mixture of Biblical quotation and homely 
philosophy, strained through Erewhonian intellects, 
become a new ethics and a new theology. His clothes 
are adopted for national wear (although through un- 
certainty as to how to put them on one part of the 
kingdom goes with buttons and pockets behind). 
Sunchildism becomes the state religion. The musical 
banks, which had been trading in stale idealism, take 
it over and get new life; and the professors of Bridge- 
ford, the intellectuals of the kingdom, capitalize it, as 



The Satiric Rage of Butler 285 

we say to-day, and thus tighten their grip on the pub- 
lic's mind and purse. 

Butler's purpose is transparent. It is not, as Long- 
mans, who refused the work, believed, to attack Chris- 
tianity. It is rather to expose the ease with which a 
good man and his message (Higgs brought with him 
to Erewhon evangelical Christianity) can become 
miraculous, can become an instrument for politics and 
a cause of sham. Indeed, Butler says in so many words 
to the Anglicans of his day: "Hold fast to your Chris- 
tianity, for false as it is it is better than what its ene- 
mies would substitute; but go easy with the miracu- 
lous, the mythical, the ritualistic. These 'tamper with 
the one sure and everlasting word of God revealed to 
us by human experience.* " 

All this is permanent enough, but I cannot believe, 
as most commentators do, that it is the heart of the 
book; or if it is the heart of the book, it is not its fire. 
The satiric rage of Butler, who in the person of Higgs 
returns to Erewhon to find himself deified, does not fall 
upon the fanatic worshipers of the sunchild, nor even 
upon the musical banks who have grown strong through 
his cult. It kindles for the ridiculous Hanky and 
Panky, professors respectively of worldly wisdom and 
worldly unwisdom at Bridgeford, and hence, according 
to Mr. Acklom, the antipathy toward Butler of all col- 
lege professors. 

But it is not because they are professors that Butler 
hates Hanky and Panky; it is because they represent 
that guaranteed authority which in every civilization 



286 Men and Their Books 

can and does exploit the passions and the weaknesses 
of human nature for its own material welfare. Butler 
had been conducting a lifelong warfare against 
scholars who defended the status quo of the church 
and against scientists who were consoHdating a 
strategic (and remunerative) position for themselves 
in the universities. He saw, or thought he saw, Eng- 
lish religion milked for the benefit of Oxford and Cam- 
bridge graduates needful of "livings"; and Darwinism 
and the new sciences generally being swept into the 
maw of the same professionally intellectual class. A 
free lance himself, with a table in the British Museum, 
some books and a deficit instead of an income from his 
intellectual labors, he attacked the vested interests of 
his world. 

He exposed the dangers which wait upon all miracu- 
lous religions, the shams which they give birth to. But 
not because he was obsessed with theology. If he 
had lived in the nineteen hundreds he would have 
studied, I think, sociology and economics instead of 
theology and biology. He would have attacked, in 
England, the House of Lords instead of Oxford, and 
had an eye for the intellectuals who are beginning to 
sway the mighty power of the labor unions. He would 
have been a Radical-Conservative and voted against 
both the British Labor party and the Coalition. In 
America he would have lashed the trusts, execrated the 
Anti-Saloon League, admired and been exasperated by 
Mr. Wilson, hated the Republican party, and probably 
have voted for it lest worse follow its defeat. He would 



the Satiric Rage of Butler 287 

have been, in short, a liberal of a species very much 
needed just now in America, a bad party man, de- 
structive rather than constructive, no leader, but a 
satirist when, God knows, we need one for the clearing 
of our mental atmosphere. 

And unless I am wrong throughout this brief analy- 
sis, Samuel Butler, who mentally and spiritually is 
essentially our contemporary, would not, if he were 
writing now, concern himself with theology at all, 
but with the shams and unreasons which are the vested 
tyrannies set over us to-day. Erewhon, when we last 
hear of it, is about to become a modern colonial state. 
Its concern is with an army and with economics. 
Chow-Bok, the savage, now become a missionary 
bishop, is about to administer its ecclesiastical system. 
Its spiritual problems no longer center upon the 
validity of miraculous tradition and the logic of a 
theological code. But the vested interests (repre- 
sented by Pocus, the son of Hanky) remain. These 
Butler would attack in the needed fashion. These re- 
main the enemy. 



VII 

Conclusion 



Defining the Indefinable 

I AM well aware that literature or even such an incon- 
siderable part of literature as this gay book on my desk 
or the poem on the printed page, as a whole is indefin- 
able. Every critic of literature from Aristotle down 
has let some of it slip between his fingers. If he de- 
scribes the cunning form of a play or a story, then the 
passion in it, or the mood behind it, eludes him. If he 
defines the personality of the writer, the art which 
makes all the difference between feeling and expres- 
sion escapes definition. No ten philosophers yet agree 
as to whether beauty is an absolute quality, or simply 
an attribute of form, whether a poem is beautiful be- 
cause it suggests and approaches an archetype, or 
whether it is beautiful because it perfectly expresses 
its subject. 

And yet when the ambition to explain and describe 
and define everything is humbly set aside there re- 
mains a good honest job for the maker of definitions, 
and it is a job that can be done. I may not be able to 
tell what art is, but I can tell what it isn't. I may 
fail to m.ake a formula for literature, but I can try at 
least to tell what Thomas Hardy has chiefly accom- 
plished, define Conrad's essential quality, point out 
the nature of romantic naturalism, and distinguish be- 
tween sentiment and sentimentality. And if such 

291 



292 Conclusion 

things were ever worth doing they are worth doing now. 

Only a prophet dares say that we are at the begin- 
ning of a great creative period in the United States, 
but any open-eyed observer can see that an era of 
American literary criticism is well under way. The 
war, which confused and afterward dulled our think- 
ing, stirred innumerable critical impulses, which are 
coming to the surface, some like bubbles and others 
like boils, but some as new creations of the American 
intellect. The new generation has shown itself acri- 
moniously critical. It slaps tradition and names its 
novels and poetry as Adam named the animals in the 
garden, out of its own imagination. The war shook it 
loose from convention, and like a boy sent away to 
college, its first impulse is to disown the Main Street 
that bore it. Youth of the 90's admired its elders and 
imitated them unsuccessfully. Youth of the nineteen 
twenties imitates France and Russia of the 70's, and 
contemporary England. It may eventually do more 
than the 90's did with America; in the meantime, 
while it flounders in the attempt to create, it is at least 
highly critical. Furthermore, the social unrest, begin- 
ning before the war and likely to outlast our time, has. 
made us all more critical of literature. Mark Twain's 
"Yankee in King Arthur's Court" turned the milk of 
Tennyson's aristocratic "Idylls" sour. The deep drawn 
undercurrent of socialistic thinking urges us toward a 
new consideration of all earlier writing, to see what may 
be its social significance. The "churl," the "hind," the 



Defining the Indefinable 293 

"peasant," the "first servant" and "second country- 
man," who were the mere transitions of earlier stories 
now are central in literature. They come with a chal- 
lenge, and when we read Galsworthy, Wells, Sinclair, 
Dreiser, Hardy's "The Dynasts," Bennett — we are con- 
scious of criticizing life as we read. The pale cast of 
thought has sicklied modern pages. The more serious 
works of art are also literary criticism. 

Again, there is the mingling of the peoples, greatest 
of course in America. Our aliens used to be sub- 
servient to the national tradition. They went about 
becoming rich Americans and regarded the Anglo- 
American culture as a natural phenomenon, like the 
climate, to which after a while they would accustom 
themselves. Their children were born in it. But now 
it is different. The Jews particularly, who keep an 
Oriental insistence upon logic even longer than a racial 
appearance, have passed the acquisitive stage and be- 
gin to throw off numerous intellectuals, as much at 
home in English as their fellow Americans, but criti- 
cal of the American emotions, and the American way 
of thinking, as only a brain formed by different tradi- 
tions can be. Soon the Mediterranean races domiciled 
here will pass into literary expressiveness. It is as im- 
possible that we should not have criticism of the 
national tradition expressed in our literature as that 
an international congress should agree upon questions 
of ethics or religion. 

And of course the new internationalism, which is far 
more vigorous than appears on the surface, favors such 



294 Conclusion 

criticism. The war brought America and Europe two 
thousand miles closer, and the habit of interest in what 
Europeans are thinking, once acquired, is not likely to 
be lost. No American writer of promise can hope now 
to escape comparison with the literatures of Western 
Europe, and comparison means a new impulse to 
criticism. 

Fundamental, creative criticism — like Sainte- 
Beuve's, Matthew Arnold's, Walter Pater's, like Dry- 
den's, Brunetiere's, De Gourmont's, or Croce's — will 
presumably come. The conditions, both of publication 
and of audience, are ripe for it now in the United 
States. But there is a good deal of spade work in the 
study of literature to be done first, and still more edu- 
cation of the reading American mind. One reason why 
Lowell was not a great critic was because his scholar- 
ship was defective, or, to put it more fairly, because 
the scholarship of his contemporaries, with whose 
knowledge he might have buttressed his own, was in- 
complete. And if a twentieth century Sainte-Beuve 
should begin to write for general American readers, it 
is doubtful whether they would accept his premises. 
Says the intellectual, why should he write for the gen- 
eral public? I answer that if he writes for coteries 
only, if he is disdainful of the intelligent multitude, he 
will never understand them, and so will not compre- 
hend the national literature which it is his function to 
stimulate, interpret, and guide. 

The spade work of criticism is research, investiga- 
tion into the facts of literature and into its social back- 



Defining the Indefinable 295 

ground. The scholar is sometimes, but not often, a 
critic. He finds out what happened, and often why 
it happened. He analyzes, but he does not usually 
make a synthesis. He writes history, but he cannot 
prophesy, and criticism is prophecy implied or direct. 
Few outside the universities realize the magnitude of 
American research into literature, even into American 
literature, which has been relatively neglected. A 
thousand spades have been at work for a generation. 
We are getting the facts, or we are learning how to 
get them. 

But before we may expect great criticism we must 
educate our public, and ourselves, in that clear vision 
of what is and what is not, which from Aristotle down 
has been the preliminary to criticism. A humble, but 
a useful, way to begin is by definition. 

I use definition in no pedantic sense. I mean, in 
general, logical definition where the class or genus oi 
the thing to be described — ^whether best-selling novel 
or sentimental tendency — is first made clear, and then 
its differentia, its differences from the type analyzed 
out and assorted. But this process in literature cannot 
be as formal as logic. Good literature cannot be bound 
by formulas. Yet when a poem charged with hot emo- 
tion, or a story that strays into new margins of experi- 
ence, is caught and held until one can compare it with 
others, see the curve on which it is moving, guess its 
origin and its aim, forever after it becomes easier to 
understand, more capable of being thought about and 
appreciated. And when the current of taste of some 



296 Conclusion 

new generation that overflows conventions and washes 
forward, or backward, into regions long unlaved, is 
viewed as a current, its direction plotted, its force esti- 
mated, its quality compared, why that is definition, 
and some good will come of it. 

Some general definition of that intellectual emotion 
which we call good reading is especially needed in 
America. Most of us, if we are native born, have been 
educated by a set of literary conventions arranged in 
convenient categories. That is more or less true of all 
literary education, but it is particularly true in the 
United States, where the formal teaching of English 
literature per se began, where, as nowhere else in the 
world, there was a great and growing population eager 
to become literate and with no literary traditions be- 
hind it. The student from a bookless home learned to 
think of his literature as primarily something to be 
studied; the teacher who had to teach thousands like 
him was forced to reduce living literature to dead 
categories in order that a little of it at least should be 
taught. Thousands of Americans, therefore, of our 
generation emerged from their training with a set of 
literary definitions which they assumed to be true and 
(Supposed to be culture. Only true definitions of what 
literature really is can break up such fossilized de- 
fining. 

On the other hand, that large proportion of our best 
reading population which is not native in its traditions 
offers a different but equally important problem. How 



Defining the Indefinable 297 

can the son of a Russian Jew, whose father lived in a 
Russian town, who himself has been brought up in 
clamorous New York, understand Thoreau, let us say, 
or John Muir, or Burroughs, or Willa Gather, without 
some defining of the nature of the American environ- 
ment and the relation between thought and the soil? 
How is an intelligent German-American, whose cultural 
tradition has been thoroughly Teutonic, to make him- 
self at home in a literature whose general character, 
like its language, is English, without some defining of 
the Anglo-American tradition? Lincoln must be de- 
fined for him; Milton must be defined for him; most 
of all perhaps Franklin must be defined for him. I 
have chosen elementary examples, but my meaning 
should be sufficiently clear. 

And the American critic — ^by which I mean you, O 
discriminating reader, as well as the professional who 
puts pen to paper — is equally in need of the art of 
definition. The books we read and write are on differ- 
ent planes of absolute excellence or un worthiness. 
There is — to take the novel — the story well calculated 
to pass a pleasant hour but able to pass nothing else; 
there is the story with a good idea in it and worth 
reading for the idea only; there is the story worthless 
as art but usefully catching some current phase of ex- 
perience; and there is the fine novel which will stand 
any test for insight, skill, and truth. Now it is folly 
to apply a single standard to all these types of story. 
It can be done, naturally, but it accomplishes nothing 
except to eliminate all but the shining best. That is 



298 Conclusion 

a task for history. In the year in which we live^ — and 
it is sometimes necessary to remind the austerer critic 
that we always live in the present — there are a hun- 
dred books, of poetry, of essays, of biography, of fic- 
tion, which are by no means of the first rank and yet 
are highly important, if only as news of what the world, 
in our present, is thinking and feeling. They cannot 
be judged, all of them, on the top plane of perfect ex- 
cellence; and if we judge them all on any other plane, 
good, better, best get inextricably mixed. 

For example, consider once more a novel which at 
the moment of this writing is a best-seller, and which 
with reference to its popularity I have discussed in an 
earlier essay. I mean Mr. Hutchinson's ^^If Winter 
Comes." This book is essentially the tragedy of a 
good and honest soul thrown by harsh circumstance 
into an environment which is bound to crush him. He 
has the wrong wife, he has the wrong business associ- 
ates, the girl he loves is separated from him by moral 
barriers. If he breaks through these he injures irrepar- 
ably his own sense of what is due to his God and his 
fellow man. His instincts of charity, humor, and love 
rebound upon him. He is too Christian for England, 
and too guileless for life. This is a worthy theme, and 
yet if we judge this novel on the highest plane it fails 
miserably. For Mr. Hutchinson stacks the cards. He 
gives his hero his way and his salvation, after much 
suffering, by a series of lucky accidents. He destroys 
the problem he creates, by forging an answer. 

But this novel should not be finally judged on the 



Defining the Indefinable 299 

highest plane. It is not a tragedy, it is a romance. It 
belongs on the plane below, the plane of stories told to 
meet the secret desires of humanity, which have little 
to do with reality, and are quite oblivious to fact. On 
this plane "If Winter Comes" ranks highly, for it is 
poignantly told, there is life in its characters, and truth 
in the best of its scenes. Definition saves us from call- 
ing a good novel great; it spares us the unnecessary 
error of calling a good and readable story bad because 
it is not a triumph of consistent art. 

It is hard enough in all conscience to see that a given 
book is good for this but not good for that; may be 
praised for its plot, but certainly has not character 
enough to get long life. But when the difficulty of 
adjusting standards is increased by the irresponsible 
hullabaloo of commercial appreciation, no wonder that 
sensible people estimate foolishly, and critics of stand- 
ing are induced to write for publication remarks that 
some day will (or should) make them sick. For the 
publishers' "blurb" confuses all standards. Every 
book is superlative in everything. And the hack re- 
viewer, when he likes a book, likes everything and ap- 
plies Shakespearian adjectives and Tolstoyan at- 
tributes to creatures of dust and tinsel, or blunders 
helplessly into dispraise of scholarship, restraint, sub- 
tlety, taste, originaHty — ^anything that he does not un- 
derstand. 

There is no help except to set books upon their planes 
and assort them into their categories — which is merely 
to define them before beginning to criticize. This is 



300 Conclusion 

elementary work as I have said, which may lead the 
critic only so far as the threshold, and cannot always 
give the reader that complete and sympathetic compre- 
hension of what he has read which is the final object 
of literary criticism. However, in an age when over- 
emphasis has been commercialized, and where the 
powerful forces of print can be mobilized and sent 
charging everywhere to bowl down contrary opinions, 
it is indispensable. 

Scholarly books have been dispraised because they 
were not exciting; fine novels have been sneered at be- 
cause they were hard to read; cheap stories have been 
proclaimed great because they wore a pretense of seri- 
ousness; sentimentality has been welcomed because it 
was warm hearted; indecency has been condemned for 
immorality; immorality has slipped through as ro- 
mance; daring has been mistaken for novelty; pains- 
taking dulness, for careful art; self -revelation, for 
world knowledge; pretty writing, for literature; vio- 
lence, for strength; and warped and unhealthy egoism 
for the wise sincerity which is the soul of literature. 
In all such instances definition is the prophylactic, and 
often the cure. 

Writers, most of all, need to define their tasks. I 
do not mean their technical problems merely, although 
I cannot conceive that a dramatist or pla5rwright, who 
has his subject well in mind, can possibly be hurt by 
thinking out his methods with the most scrupulous 
care. Lubbock's recent book on "The Craft of Fic- 
tion" has emphasized an art of approach and point of 



Defining the Indefinable 301 

view in the great novelists which was thoroughly con- 
scious, even though they may never have tried to for- 
mulate it in words. I mean particularly the defining 
of their themes, their objectives. Many modern novels 
of the better class, and a great many modern poems, 
seem to me awash and wallowing like derelicts on the 
high seas. They are successful enough in this, excel- 
lent in that, but they get nowhere, because the writers 
had felt the emotion that made them, or suffered the 
experience, but never defined it in terms of all emotion, 
all experience, never considered its end. The three 
dots ... of modern literature are significant. We 
break off our efforts, partly no doubt because we seek 
effects of impressionism, more often because imagina- 
tion went no further. Near things are sharp and ex- 
pressed with remarkable vividness, ultimate objectives 
are blurred, which is to say, they lack definition. 

May the shades of Dr. Johnson, Charles Lamb, Em- 
erson, and all great individualists protect us from bad 
definitions, and especially from rigid or formal ones! 
Bad definitions destroy themselves, for if they are 
thoroughly bad no one believes them, and if they con- 
tain those pleasing half truths which a generation loves 
to suckle upon, why then after their vogue they will 
wither into nothingness. Such definitions are of the 
letter, and die by it, but stiff, clumsy definitions kill 
the spirit. To define a great man by a rigid formula is 
to sink to the lowest practice of the worst class rooms. 
To define a tendency so sharply that it cannot flow 



302 Conclusion 

without breaking the definition, is a lecturer's trick 
for which audiences should stone him. Solemn gen- 
eralizations which squat upon a book like an ostrich on 
a goose egg and hatch out vast moral philosophies are 
to be dreaded like the devil, as are, equally, the critics 
with pet theories, who, having defined them, make 
everything from a squib to an epic fit their definition. 

Definitions which classify without margins are a 
special evil: the division into hterature and journalism 
for example, with no allowance for interlocking; or the 
confident separation of all books into categories of good 
or bad. Wholesale definitions are also objectionable, 
where having defined a poem as magazine verse, or a 
collection of articles as a magazine, or a book as a sex 
story, or a man as a journalist, or a tendency as erratic 
or erotic, you think you have said something. May 
the muse of clear thinking, and the little humorous 
gods who keep the sense of proportion balancing, pro- 
tect us from these also. 

It occurs to me that I have made but a lame attempt 
to define definition. This, however, is as it should be. 
For definition, in the sense in which I am using it, like 
literature, has much of the indefinable. It is a tool 
merely, or better still, because broader, a device by 
which the things we enjoy and that profit us may be 
placed in perspective, ranged, compared, sorted, and 
distinguished. It is what Arnold meant by seeing 
steadily and seeing whole. It is the scientist's micro- 
scope that defines relationship, and equally the paint- 
er's brush that by a touch reveals the hidden shapes 



Defining the Indefinable 303 

of nature and the blend of colors. It is, like these in- 
struments, a means and not an end. May pedants, 
scholiasters, formalists, and dilettantes take to heart 
this final description of literary definition! 

Quite unconsciously for the most part, but occasion- 
ally with purpose aforethought, the essays in this book 
have been written as literary definitions. Its unity lies 
in the attempt, which at least has been sincere, to 
grasp, turn, study in a serious, humorous, ironical, any- 
thing but a flippant mood, the living forms of literature 
as they have risen into consciousness and challenged 
definition. 



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